


Flour, Yeast, Water, Salt

by calyxofawildflower (whisperthroughthewall)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Anxiety, Baking, Cooking, Dissociation, Dissociative States, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Romance, F/M, Food, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Human Cole, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, Love, Original Character(s), POV Third Person Limited, Past Tense, Post-Canon, Pre-Trespasser, Servants, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Social Anxiety, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-03-15 06:50:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 53,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3437576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whisperthroughthewall/pseuds/calyxofawildflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The reach and reputation of the Inquisition has only grown in the year since the breach was sealed and Corypheus defeated, and its servants' work has only increased. Cole, left behind and nearly friendless, finds kind crumbs of comfort in the kitchens as he befriends one of the Inquisition's bakers.</p><p>On hiatus until March 2018.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Winter closed on the Frostbacks like a pair of jaws. The roads that wreathed through the mountain passes to the doors of Skyhold had piled with insatiable snow, blowing in harsh, powdery winds that stuck and scoured wagons and trapped travellers to huddle in tents. The cold cracked stones, dropped thick blades of ice, withered trees—it was weather full of bitterness. Two weeks of work to clear the route: grit thrown, snow packed into paths, drifts pushed aside, and the inhabitants of the Inquisition who had learned to subsist on dry bread and cured fish now jumped at the hope of fresher food. And it came, by the cartful; plain things first—potatoes, leeks, onions, flour—but then bananas from Antiva, thick bunches of grapes from an Orlesian vineyard, even citrus from the orangeries in Montsimmard. Fruit that brought the hope of warmer weather with them, when everything would flower again.

Now the kitchens stirred to life and, with them, Skyhold. Steam and smoke stirred the sky above the castle, erupting from its depths, heaving, breathing. Only oven fire burned bright enough to keep out the cold that gripped greedily at the stomach and lungs.

“Keep the apples out here,” Fabien said, jabbing a finger at a pair of strong-armed men who hoisted up a box together. “Put them by the well.”

The wagons that had trundled their way from Val Royeaux to Skyhold’s lower courtyard now squatted, half-stuck in frozen mud, as servants pulled snow-crusted barrels from their backs and rolled them towards the kitchens. The men who carried the box of apples diverted, scowling, nearly knocking the casket of fruit into the elf as they passed. He cleared his throat noisily, watching as they jammed crowbars into the corners of the wooden lid and pried it up by inches. Lille was laying out low stools around a little brazier by the courtyard's well, whose coals gleamed and hissed as Bri poked them with a charred stick and kicked the snow around its base to clear it from their path.

The box lay open now; Lille smiled, delighted, while Bri, at her side, reached down and took one up—a bright red bauble against the snow.

“Finally,” Lille said, staring at the shining fruit. “Something to do besides scrub pots.”

“Pies after this,” Bri said, “lots of them.”

“Good.”

They smiled at one another, quick, conspiratorial, as though their work was their small secret—little pleasures shared privately.

"Get started," Fabien said, and sat on his stool, his long legs bending awkwardly. They each had knives in their aprons; they took them out and sat around the brazier.

“We’ve got the whole afternoon,” Lille said, slicing off the first slip of apple skin, “Bri’s already made all the pastry.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, with a bob of her shoulders.

“You _should_ sleep. You _look_ tired,” Lille said, “I’m surprised you don’t nod off right in the kitchen. One minute kneading dough, next you’ve got your face planted right in it.” She mimed the movement, ducking her head into her lap for a moment before bolting back upright under Fabien’s eye.

"I'll be fine," Bri said.

“I heard a rumor the Divine herself might be coming to Skyhold in a few months, you'll need to—Oh." She stopped short, and jabbed her elbow into Bri’s side. "Heyup.”

“Wha—Ohh.” She turned to look where Lille was pointedly staring, a sly smile creasing the edges of her mouth.

The Grey Warden—or, not a Warden really, she thought, scraping up the gossip that had tittered across the servants’ halls a year ago—had emerged from the stables with an axe. He was wearing a simple tunic, his muscles plain to see beneath the thin fabric; he hoisted his woodsman's weapon and laid an upended log on a stump before the stables and drove his axe through it, a quick, heavy movement. The split halves fell aside; he picked them up and threw them into the pile with the others.

“ _Maker_ ,” Lille said, and Bri shook her head.

"Blackwall, isn't it?" she asked in low tones. Lille nodded after a few moments, turning as if she hadn’t heard the question.

"I _think_ so."

They watched as he chopped logs. Bri winced with every fall of the axe. Lille peeled a whorl of flesh from the apple in her hand before she realized what she was doing. Fabien scowled, hunched, puffs of breath clouding the air in front of his face. Soon, steam rose from the Warden's shoulders. He stopped to mop his brow with a lace-edged handkerchief—out of place, crumpled, its delicate curlicues stained with sweat.

“I wonder where he got that,” Lille asked idly, her eyes still fixed on him.

“Lady Montilyet,” Bri said, “from what I’ve heard. Alizée found it and tried to return it to her but was told to put it back.”

“Oh, how _romantic_ ,” Lille said, laughing to herself, “I can see why she’d be after him.”

“Quit staring and peel your apples, Lille,” Fabien said, digging his heels into the snow. Lille laughed again, lips pressed together in a barely-restrained smile.

“He can peel _my_ apples,” she said, and winked at Bri—who laughed, covering her mouth with her hand.

"He'll hear you," she said, hushed. Lille laughed again and opened her mouth to speak but glanced at Fabien and instead sullenly gritted her jaw.

They worked in silence for a time, but for the rhythmic fall of the axe. The lower courtyard milled with people as the day wore on; two servants argued with a merchant over the price of salt, a masked noble arrived with his retinue disheveled from the snow-stuck paths, and the ostlers paced horses past them, the beasts' heavy breaths hanging in the air as they snorted, jittery, blankets on their backs. The Warden finished his task, stacked the newly-hewn firewood neatly in the byre, and left.

Bri turned each apple in her hands, the skins coming off in unbroken curls. Her fingers were numb and red-tipped from the cold. 

“I’ll get the tea when I’ve finished this one," she offered.

“Lemons came in today, didn’t they?” Lille asked excitedly, “from Montsimmard? Can you put a slice in mine?”

“I’ll try,” Bri said, tossing the peeled fruit with the others.

“Do,” Lille said, her voice laced with exaggerated pleading. “It's been so long since we got any.”

“Yeah,” Bri said, “and we’ve got two nobles in who _need_ lemon cakes every morning.”

Lille winked, and laughed. “ _Mais trop de citron_ , yeah? They won’t miss just one slice.”

"They notice everything!" Bri said, sighing as she turned to climb the icy stairs to the castle. "But I'll try."

Up the steps by twos and then, pushing past the door, a cloud of shouts and sweat; _sauciers_ stirred, sweating over their simmering pans, while the cook and her commis poured fat over a stuck twist of meat on a spit over the fire. Piles of potatoes were stacked in one corner, a single kitchen maid peeling them one by one with quick hands and dropping the rounds into a bucket of water. The centre worktable was covered over with chopped herbs and cracked, empty eggshells, while above them hung links of dried meat and bulbous cudgels of aging cheese, rinds stained with grease. Others, kitchenhands with wide, frightened eyes, sliced the bread she and Fabien had made that morning, careful of fingertips, more careful of the head cook's eyes as he watched from the centre of the room. The fire hissed as the cook ladled more fat down the joint, which spat and crackled happily. Below, in the embers, a cast-iron pot sat squat and black among the hearth's hot ashes, belly boiling. 

The midday meal unfolded. Bri scurried between the press of bodies to heave the heavy kettle from the shelf, its floral pattern long faded, dented from use. She grabbed the neck of the little pot beside it—bitter leaves for brewing, sent from the Free Marches, too rough for the delicate tastes upstairs.

"Briony!"

She knew, from years of service, not to be startled by a shouted name. She turned, holding the kettle against her hip.

"Master Donatien?" she asked; his eyes were on her, arms crossed, looking down the length of his nose.

"The apples?"

"Being peeled, Messere," she answered dutifully. "Should be done with them in an hour."

He nodded; the only sign he ever gave of his contentment.

"Bring this upstairs," he said shortly, and gestured to a bowl of raw meat that sat unassumingly by the door that lead to the cellars. "The rookery."

"I'm not—" she began, but stopped short.

"Lowri is busy," he said, sharp, nose wrinkled, frowning. The girl peeling potatoes, an elf a few years younger than she, looked up from her task and smiled meekly—her knife's sharp sheen had been dulled by starch, her fingers red and raw; she turned back to her task and dug her blade into another potato from the pile.

"If you can stop for tea you can stop to feed the ravens," he said.

"Yes, Master Donatien." Her mouth a flat line, she turned and placed the kettle and pot of tea leaves back on the shelf and grabbed the bowl with both hands, opening the door to the cellars with her shoulder.

A steep climb to the where the ravens made nests of all of Thedas' secrets. The bowl was heavy and reeked like an open wound—raw flesh usually smelled fresher—something they couldn't put in the soldiers' pies. She climbed the stairs with it, head ducked, passing other servants with the same sense to not be seen. The study with its faded frescoes, then the library where two mages argued in whispers and a woman, Tranquil, stood by the railing. A Templar guarded the steps, and Bri avoided his eyes as he peered at her through the slit in his helmet.

"Food for the ravens," she said quietly, and he nodded for her to go up.

The topmost tier of the round tower stank of smoke and rotten meat, and the few thready fumes of incense fluttering at the feet of the shrine to Andraste did little to curb the smell. Bri stopped in front of the alcove, looking up at the blank eyes that stared with the serenity reserved for unfeeling things, with the patience reserved for things that had all the time in the world. The fire she held aloft made the air around her stone face shimmer.

An irritated squawk brought Bri back to her task; the birds had turned to look at her, their tiny black eyes staring half-lidded, feathers puffed around their necks, fully succumbed to the lethargy of the season. But when they spied the bowl of raw and bleeding meat she carried and, even better, placed out for them, they clacked their beaks delightedly and sprung to life again. Trilling, cackling like old women, they descended on the meal with a flutter of black and red feathers. Their claws grazed her tied-tight hair and their wings brushed past her shoulders as they crowded to dig into the offered carrion. Bri suppressed a shriek and hurried away from the ravenous clustering of beaks and talons—they pulled pieces of meat apart between them, fighting over the tender cuts, choking down the carcass of what she now realized to be a long-dead nug. Bad hunting in the mountains in wintertime, the pink things lean as a rasher of bacon and streaking across the snow—all the meat scraped from its bones for the ravens' mean meal.

One bird raised its head from the scrabble of feathers, a single round eye caught between a beak slicked with blood and fat. The firelight flashed across it. She felt the gall rise in her throat, and turned away from the sight.

The window by the table was the only truly bright point in the room—she went to it. Skyhold housed dozens of servants; they kept the keep clothed and fed and stocked with everything from water to weapons. They clustered in the courtyard below, skittered across the battlements, their tasks unending, their work undiminished since the breach in the sky had closed more than a year before. If anything it had increased, with nobles from every country in Thedas clamoring to meet with the woman who had saved them all, who had saved the Chantry. Bri watched as a band of pilgrims picked their way up icy steps; perhaps they had taken the path from Haven that had become so holy. Merchants had begun to sell little trinkets to these reverent travellers, coins embossed with the eye of the Inquisition, totems to prove they had visited the site where the Herald conducted her business in Andraste's name. Skyhold shrewdly prospered.

Far beneath her, in the bowels of the castle, the kitchens heaved. Here, cold, cloud-streaked, the light glancing off the mountaintops was blindingly white; it seemed, at the top of the keep, as though the sky were only a few inches above her. The wind rushed past the window, a wild, low sound; it could not touch her through the diamond-patterned glass. When she had arrived she'd asked Fabien to tell her the Elven name for the place—grudgingly, bitterly, he’d told her. The words never stuck in her mind but what they meant did; _the place where the sky is kept_. Here, they held up the heavens. She felt, for a moment, the lonely luxury of those above—the severe serenity of those apart, like when she sleeplessly mounted the steps to the kitchens in the middle of the night to make pastry for the day ahead.

Something shifted at the edge of her vision; she turned away from the window. The clots of black in the shadows clucked on their perches, content after their squabbling feast, but then she spied an enormous hat, and beneath that a whey-faced boy who crouched under the birds' perches—they barely seemed to register his presence. In the shadows and scant torchlight she could not make out his face, but she stayed, and watched him cautiously; he moved like one of those tin toys from Orzammar—the kind that stuttered to life when pushed along a length of string, balancing on a pedaled wheel as mechanical knees and elbows jutted out with every turn. He was gathering the birds' shed feathers, she realized, with the single-mindedness of a sacred task. He appraised each one under the brim of his hat, discarding some according to a standard she could not fathom, while others he kept closed in his other hand. The birds preened above him, either unaware or unconcerned.

Suddenly, when he had apparently collected enough, he stood and moved to the railing and leaned to look down on the floors below. Bri moved closer, half-hid by the wooden beam, curious. One by one he let them fall over the side, fluttering down past the tiered landings. Directly beneath him stood the Tranquil, who, like the birds, did nothing.

Determined, he continued, and at last the Tranquil took notice; those impassive eyes, black as though they absorbed all light, were caught by the twirling fall of a feather—the boy stopped, and watched in silence as the Tranquil reached out and the feather danced in the air around her fingers, arcing on invisible strings until it finally settled softly in her palm. She held it, staring—it was one of the birds' long pinfeathers, knife-shaped and as sharp, a gash of black in the woman's hand.

Bri expected her to simply let it fall but she watched, perplexed, as the Tranquil raised the feather up and with a short, sharp breath blew it back out into the air. The woman kept her eyes on it as it whirled and wound its way to the floor below, but even as the feather fell, joyously free in the still air, her face was still as stone. When it slipped out of sight, the Tranquil turned away.

Bri had met a Tranquil only once, as a child in Val Chevin; a hired enchanter for her mother's employer. The other servants avoided him and whispered prayers to Andraste, a guard against the existential terror he inspired—for all the fears of the Fade and what dwelled there, there was a deeper horror at the thought of its loss. Once, her sympathy bred more of confusion than any other feeling, Bri had brought a pastry to him—a simple thing of fruit folded in a sweet shortcrust. She had never seen anyone eat so joylessly, chewing and swallowing with the same expression with which he performed every task to which he was assigned, a passivity that laid everything before the eye, no secrets, no feeling hid away at which one must guess—like a hollow-eyed skull, utterly denuded of flesh.

She had not been surprised when, much later, the whispers reached her that the rebel mages had abandoned to fate these shadows of themselves.

When she looked back to the railing across the room, the boy had gone—disappeared into the landing's long shadows. He had done so with such complete absence of sound that she worried for a moment that he was directly behind her—he was not. She waited for a moment, then, creeping over to the birds' roosts, she snatched the bowl back and brought it down to the bustling kitchens. Quickly, quietly, she took up the kettle and tea leaves again before she could be made to do another task.

The cold pricked her skin when she stepped outside; what little warmth she had gathered in the keep now fled her.

“What took you?” Fabien said as she approached; she could see his fingers shaking as he gripped his half-peeled apple.

“Donatien sent me to the rookery,” she huffed, hoisting rope from the depths of the well. “Old nug for the ravens.” Fabien scowled.

"Isn't that Lowri's job?" he said, and Bri shrugged and ladled freezing water into the kettle, then placed it on the metal grille above the brazier. She squatted and poked the coals again, urging them to life.

"Lowri has a _lot_ of jobs," Bri said when she stood. She sprinkled tea into each cup.

“Glad I don't do that anymore,” Lille said, and snatched up her cup. “Oh—you forgot the lemon.”

“I’m sorry,” Bri said, and bit her lip. “I—didn’t want to press my luck with Donatien.”

“Angry today?” she asked. “He’s just bitter the kitchen stalled for so long.”

“We had plenty to do,” Bri said, taking her seat again.

“Not the kind he likes. He’s not happy unless he’s wading in _matelote_ and _macarons_ —haute cuisine for the Orlesian court. Can’t stand all this Fereldan food we have to make. It’s too _easy_ for us. He can’t _hit_ anyone over it.”

“He wouldn’t have to hit anyone if you’d do your _work_ ,” Fabien said sharply. Lille had let the unpeeled apple sit idle in her lap for too long.

" _Oui, chef_ ," Lille said, her tongue rolling lazily over the words. For a moment, staring pointedly, she hacked at the fruit with her knife before turning back to the task, sighing, under Fabien's reproachful eyes.

Bri had peeled three more apples before she looked up again, glancing about the courtyard as the light shifted and the short day came to its close. The sun had slipped below the castle walls; she turned to look at it and saw, to her surprise, the same boy she had spied earlier. In the failing light she could see him more clearly—his patchwork, badly-sewn clothes too thin for the weather, lank, white-blonde hair peeking from beneath his hat. He sat with his head bowed, kicking the stonework with his heel, swaying where he sat on the edge of the battlements. She was almost afraid he'd fall.

“That strange boy’s there,” Bri said, eyes shifting away, “I saw him up in the rookery, too.”

Lille and Fabien both turned to look, short glances, curious, afraid. The boy didn’t seem to notice—the cadence of his rocking didn't falter under their stares.

“What's he doing up there?” Fabien asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice trailing as she thought, again, of the Tranquil. It unsettled her—she turned the apple quickly in her hands.

“I’ve seen him around,” Lille said, “isn’t he the one Donatien told everyone to watch out for? Stealing things and such.”

“Maybe," Bri said, then added, "he’s odd."

"A little more than odd," Lille said.

“It’s ridiculous that he’s allowed to wander wherever he likes,” Fabien said, warming his fingers briefly by the coals. “What does he _do_ , exactly, besides steal things? Sneak around?”

“I think he just—” Bri began, but stopped herself. The feather floated away. "I don't know."

Fabien shook his head, nose wrinkled in disapproval.

The kettle whistled; Bri wrapped a hand in her apron and poured boiling water into their cups— when she looked back to the battlements, tea in hand, the boy was gone again.

“Oh,” she said, “he’s disappeared.”

They all turned to look; the battlements were empty, nothing but the fading sky above them. The day's light had burnished into a bright gold, haunting, slipping away helplessly behind the mountaintops.

“Strange boy,” Lille said. Bri nodded idly. They drank their tea. Work continued. Lille hoisted the bucket twice to bring the scraps to the horses in the stables. Soon the box of apples ran out. Together, Bri and Fabien brought the peeled fruit to the kitchens, where the cooks rested between the mealtime rushes. Inside, stewing apples, folding fruit into endless pastry, Bri did not see or think of the boy again.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Shelling nuts, grinding loaves of sugar into dust, churning milk to butter, chipping chocolate off blocks shipped south from Seheron—when the ovens cooled, their fires quelled and ashes swept out, the tasks turned to the intricacies of finer foods for the days ahead.

Diplomatic ties across Thedas all demanded different sweets: bite-sized stacked sponge for Orlesian nobility, Rivani nut-and-honey treats wrapped in paper-thin sheets of dough, cakes cooked on swiveling spits for dwarven dignitaries. Even the blacksmith, soot-stained, his voice roughened by coal-fire, had come to them one morning and asked if they might think to make a type of steamed pudding speckled with dried fruit, if they had the time, if it was no trouble.

It was enormous trouble, but, boiling on the stovetop for hours, they'd made it for him.

Mornings were simpler; when the ovens were stoked they cooked the more delicate pastries, then the day's bread baked when the fires were hotter. But when the other cooks, all knives and fire, bones and broiling, left for the evening, the bakers remained.

The apples from three days before had been cooked into everything from sauce to stuffing. Now Bri mixed dough to rise in the chill air overnight while Lille ground almonds, bearing down on the pestle and gritting her teeth. Raspberries, once frozen in a crisp of ice, simmered softly on the stovetop; steam curled from the pot as Fabien stirred.

"Check the sugar," Fabien said with a sharp sigh. Lille pulled back a laugh into a tight-lipped frown. She put down the pestle, unstoppered the jar, and dug a few grains out with a finger and laid them on the tip of her tongue.

"Sweet!" she said, triumphant. He snapped his fingers for it and she put the jar in his hands, rolling her eyes. He stirred spoonfuls into the pot of stewing fruit. Lille took the sugar back to the shelf when he had finished.

“Can’t you just talk to her, Fabien?” Lille cooed, and laughed at the little wrinkle of his nose she took such delight in eliciting.

“Why, because we’re both elves?” he asked, his eyes still on the pot. She shrugged; he shook his head. “She hates elves.”

“So do you,” Lille said. “That’s what I meant—you have so much in common.”

“That is _not_ true." His voice had sharpened. Bri looked up from her kneading, glancing to Lille—she had gone back to gleefully smashing down the almonds into dust.

"It is," she said between knocks of the pestle. Fabien didn't answer, only watched as the sugared berries bubbled and spat. Then he took a cheesecloth and strained the syrup from the mixture into a jar that steamed with the heat—the little seeds and bits of red flesh he threw into the scrap bucket with such force that it teetered.

"Finish the dough and clean up—I'm leaving," he said, wiping his hands on his dirty smock and, with a sharp glance to Bri, he left through the door to the cellars.

Lille watched with wide eyes as the door slammed behind him.

“You tease him too much,” Bri said, frowning.

“Well, someone’s got to tease him or else I swear his head would get so big he’d float away.” The almonds had been ground finely, sticking at the edges of the mortar. Lille tipped the grains into a bowl and threw a cloth over them.

“I know, but—maybe not about that. Here, pit the cherries." The fruit had thawed by the fire and now lay in a bowl on the table, dark red skins glistening in the low light. Lille took the knife from her apron and set upon them; she hummed as she worked. Bri turned back to her dough and punched it down against the worktable.

The rough accumulation of flour, yeast, water, and salt—first stringy and full of lumps—now slowly worked into a smooth, even dough between her hands. In the summers they'd make the dough the same day as the bread but the cold that seeped into every dark room of the castle made it rise so slowly they could leave it for hours. She pinched a piece between her fingers, pulling it out and holding it to the dim candlelight; it shone through, cloudy but clear—it was kneaded enough.

Leaving it in a clean bowl covered over with cloth, she moved to make another. Every day since she arrived, a month or two after the Inquisition began rebuilding after the destruction of Haven, she had made loaves of bread alongside Fabien. Lille came later, sent to help as the Inquisition grew in size and with it its demand for fresh-baked bread and pastries. Always short-tempered, always punching at the dough with the heels of his hands as though he fought with it, Fabien had barely spoken to Bri until Lille joined them. Now he snapped and scolded and shouted like the head cook.

"You know," Bri had said to Lille a few months after she had joined them, "the only other elves in the kitchen are the scullery maids and that boy who sweeps the ashes out in the evening."

"Yeah?" Lille had answered, wringing out a kitchen cloth over the basin.

"I think it bothers him."

"Who?"

"Fabien." Lille had simply laughed, a short shock of sound.

"Everything bothers Fabien."

But Bri had heard both _knife-ear_ and _flat-ear_ since she had arrived. The other elves, servants or officers, kept to themselves—Fabien was never among them.

“Oh!” Lille said, nearly jumping from her seat—Bri turned to look at her, a ball of half-kneaded dough in her hands.

“Lowri’s told me the cat’s had her kittens.” Lille said, and pricked a pit from a firm-fleshed cherry and smiled.

“When?” Bri asked.

“A week ago,” she said, “Desmond found them in the corner of one of the stalls, they nearly got stepped on by a horse. He tried to move them but she hissed so loud he just moved the horse."

"Why didn't Lowri tell us sooner?" Bri asked.

"Because Desmond didn’t tell anyone until today. Simple boy."

"Ah, he's not that bad," Bri said, turning back to the worktable. She'd seen him, sometimes, practicing his letters in the hayloft before the day's work started.

"Oh, I see," Lille said, slipping another pit from its place. "Talked to him much?"

"Not really," Bri said, hesitating between the words. Lille turned in her seat.

"You never come out with the rest of us. You should!"

"I don't like going to the tavern," Bri said, shrugging.

"Then don't come to the tavern. Come with us to the valley sometime. Come to the village with us on your days off. Do something, Briony!"

"Maybe someday," she answered idly. Lille rolled her eyes. The pitted cherries piled up in the bowl beside her.

"It's so strange being the only one who knows you," Lille said. Bri's fingers stilled, sank into the pliant dough. Lille turned to look at her in the silence that followed, without even the rhythmic roll of kneading.

"Ah, I'm sorry, Bri," Lille said,

"It's all right," Bri said.

"I didn't mean to, well—" She dropped her eyes, glancing about, then dug her fingers into the bowl beside her. "Here, have a cherry."

She held it up to the light, her fingertips stained red, grinning. Bri shook her head; Lille's smile slipped; still, she popped it into her mouth, then another.

"Maker," she said, "You know, I haven't eaten a cherry since the summer."

"You shouldn't," Bri said, but she gave a light laugh when Lille winked at her and so she smiled again, scooped up a small handful, and tilted it into her mouth.

The door to the cellars jerked open. Lille nearly fell from her stool; she swallowed the stolen fruit and wiped her hands on her apron.

The head cook stood by the dying fire. Bri turned, and stood with her hands held neatly behind her back, tense, attentive.

"How are things?" He asked, almost pleasant—his eyes did not rest on them, but lightly surveyed the room.

"Bread's mixed for tomorrow, the almonds are ready for the _macarons_ , raspberry syrup is cooling," she began, and listed the rest of the evening's tasks, nodding between each one. He walked to the table and lifted the cloth from one of the bowls of dough, then replaced it without comment. Then he turned to Lille.

"Does the Inquisition pay for fruit to be shipped from Antiva directly into your mouth, Lille?"

"I—" she stuttered, wiping her lips again with her sleeve.

"Cherries, plums, a pot of custard, two jars of honey," he said, his voice even. "Do you think these things grow here, in the middle of winter?"

"No, but I—"

“Come here, Lille.”

The air was still, heavy. He would wait for only a moment.

“Master Don—”

“I'm not talking to you, Briony.” His eyes had snapped to her and she had fallen silent in an instant. Now he looked back to Lille. “I said come _here_.”

A heartbeat of hesitation, eyes wide, but then chin raised, shoulders held back, she marched to the far wall where the switch sat on the shelf—long, cruel, knife-thin—and brought it to him. Her hands were presented with the solemnity of a Chantry sister taking vows.

She had been hit before; he raised the switch. She bit her lip at the first descent, the sound catching in her throat before she allowed it to escape. The second was the same, held tight in her chest. The third, fourth, fifth, she muffled them with gritted teeth, her fingers trembling. The sixth was when she yelped, cheeks red, eyes glazed with unshed tears. He stopped. She hid her hands in her skirts, twisting them up in the rough linen—a hard breath with an open mouth.

"You are not in this kitchen to steal," he said shortly. "It is not for you. It is the Inquisition's. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Lille said. "Yes, Master Donatien."

He looked about the room, as though Lille's transgression had unsettled every jar and pot in the kitchen.

"Where is the elf?"

"Fabien's left for the night, Meserre," Bri answered.

"Tomorrow morning tell him I want to see him."

"Yes, Master Donatien."

He turned, placed the switch back in its spot on the shelf, and left the same way he came.

A log, cracked, burnt to ash, broke and sent up a hiss of sparks in the hearth. Lille's fingers were criss-crossed with bright red welts—beside the cherry juice a smear of blood stained her smock, welling from the backs of her knuckles. Her crying was silent, like falling snow—her cheeks so often creased from smiling were slick with tears. Bri wiped her hands and went to her.

"Lille," Bri said, her voice a whisper. She simply shook her head. The cherries were unfinished, the halves in the bowl split and bleeding. Lille took up her knife and moved back to them—Bri stopped her with a hand at her wrist.

"No," she said, frowning. She moved and covered the cherries. "We're done for the night. Let's go. Fabien can pit the cherries himself."

"But—" Lille said, but Bri slipped her smock over her head and hung it up with the others. Lille sighed and did the same, untying the knot at her back with swollen fingers. Together they pulled on their winter clothes and left.

The door shut on the kitchen. The moons were pale coins in the sky; the snow gleamed an unnatural light, piled against stones washed in silver. They descended the steps to the lower courtyard. A thin layer of frost had fallen the night before but it had been trodden into the earth over the course of the day. They walked across the frozen path; the merchants' stalls had been packed away, tarpaulins pulled down over empty tables. The portcullis, too, had shut to the night; two guards stood their shift by the keep's heavy doors, beside torches whose flame looked dull in the cold illumination of the night's sky.

The larger moon skimmed the castle wall—there was a shadow against its borrowed light, a figure crouched on the battlements—a guard keeping watch, or a few of the ravens huddled together; Bri stared as she walked, curious, until Lille, in the corner of her vision, stopped at her side, hid her face in her hands, and sobbed.

"No, no," she whispered, and gently lead Lille by a soft touch at the shoulder to sit with her on the stone steps to the upper courtyard.

"Here," Bri said, and scooped up a handful of snow to knot it in her handkerchief. Tenderly Bri pressed it to Lille's knuckles. She hissed, tense, then her shoulders slumped and she pressed her chin to her chest.

 "I didn't take _any_ of those other things," Lille said, "I didn't."

"I know," Bri said. "Donatien just wants someone to blame."

"It's always _me_ ," Lille cried, wincing as she repositioned the cloth-wrapped snow to her other hand.

"That's not true," Bri pleaded. "Fabien would have been hit over the salt he poured on the meringues if we hadn't realised they'd been switched on purpose."

"That's different," Lille said between clenched teeth. Bri swallowed thickly, twisting at the hem of her skirts with her hands.

"Do you remember?" Bri said, and leaned against Lille's shoulder, forcing herself to smile. "When Donatien came down in a rage? ' _You stupid elf, you used salt instead of sugar!_ '" She affected the head cook's tone poorly. "Fabien was so embarrassed. He looked like he wanted to sink into the floor and die."

"Donatien still didn't hit him," Lille said, her voice sour. Shifting back in her seat, Bri's eyes slid away. She cracked a patch of ice on the step with the heel of her shoe.

"I'd have got the same for ruining those cakes. We're lucky no one said anything about the bread that day."

Above them, in the upper courtyard, there was a drift of distant laughter. Points of light burned by windows shut tight to the cold, clear winter's night. Lille placed the kerchief in her lap, rubbing at her hands; the red had faded, but the hair-thin cuts remained. They'd heal back to nothing—no marks, no scars, just the stinging memory of Donatien's switch.

"I'm always just trying to keep up," Lille said, "you and Fabien are the bakers. I just clean." Her voice steamed and disappeared, light as air, as she spoke. Bri shook her head.

"That's not true," Bri said, "everything you do is important. And even if it wasn’t, without you I think Fabien would have stabbed me by now."

Lille was silent.

“We all help in our own way,” she offered. “Where would the Inquisition be without you, without me?”

"Breadless," Lille said shortly.

"Not just. No more lemon cakes," Bri said, putting the words into a cadence, "no more _petit fours_ , no more profiteroles, no more brioche. No more pitted cherries for their tarts. What would they _do_?"

"Not eat those things," she answered, rasping. "Like the _rest_ of us."

Bri clamped her jaw tightly shut. Lille sighed—heavy, hollow, a sound so unsuited to her. Bri looked up again, searching the sky—the silhouette had gone. The stars were distant, obscured by the light of the twin moons, cold comforts in the darkness. Bri put an awkward arm around Lille's shoulders; she was still under the tentative touch.

"We could—go to the tavern, see if anyone's there?" Her voice was unsure, then she brightened. "Oh—do you want to go see the kittens?" She squeezed Lille lightly to her side. Lille smiled, finally, low and soft, and nodded.

Together they stood, arm in arm, and crossed the courtyard to the stables. The horses stood at the back of their stalls, heads sunk in sleep; the pair of them peered into each stall until they spotted the cat, the thin black mouser, a streak of shadow that stalked the halls. It had grown fat and sluggish and disappeared the week before—now it lay on its side, blinking and purring, as four jet-black kittens suckled from their mother in the hay.

Moving into the stall, Lille reached out and stroked the mother's head with three cautious fingers, scratching behind its ears as they twitched.

"I've never seen her let anyone but you do that to her.”

"She likes me," Lille answered, a proud smile at the corner of her mouth. "Some days, at least."

"You really can get anyone to like you," Bri said. Lille shrugged.

"Not Master Donatien. Not Fabien."

"They don't like anyone at all."

The cat pressed its cheek into Lille's palm. The kittens, full of need, coiled close to their mother. Lille stroked the length of the cat's back, its tail twitching in delight. The red lines along her skin were forgotten for the moment.

Lille was young—younger than Bri by a year at least. She swept and washed and never complained, burned her fingers so many times on hot pans that now she laughed whenever it happened, sang songs when she plucked pips from endless piles of fruit or cracked the shells off nuts. Her smile was bright and genuine, her laugh easy, her joy—last Wintersend she had grabbed Bri by both hands and twirled her in the kitchen until even she joined the other celebrants. Bri watched as Lille stroked the beast that had bitten Fabien so many times he'd skin it if he could catch it. She smiled, and sighed—soft, relieved.

“Lowri said there were five,” Lille said, wrinkling her brow, “do you think one’s wandered off?”

“I hope not,” Bri said. Wagons trundled through the lower courtyard, horses stomped their hooves, servants walked with careless determination through the snow, which piled treacherously high beside the walls.

“Should we look?” Lille said, turning to her. She nodded.

"Check the merchants' stalls," Bri said, "I'll look in the stable."

Lille pulled her rough cloak closer and went back the way they had come. Bri turned and moved into the barn; the moonlight diffused into shadow, the fire pit in the centre of the room burned down to ash-coated coals. First she looked in the corners of the room, pushing aside bales of hay and spare wagon parts. A worktable at the far end held a congregation of toy soldiers, some carved with armor and scabbards while others, rougher, were barely more than blocks of wood. Bri squatted beside the table and squinted, then moved to the haypile beneath the stairs.

A shift of dry straw, a flash of reflected light—she clapped her hand over her mouth and jumped back. It was that same boy, straw stuck to his sewn-up shirt, the brim of his hat tilted to obscure his face, standing in silence in the shadows under the stairs. He held out his hands, and between them was the squirming black kitten, biting at the tips of his fingers with a toothless mouth.

“Oh,” she said, glancing to it. Quietly, she took the kitten from him. It mewed, hard, high-pitched, plucked too soon from its hiding spot.

“He likes the hay,” he whispered. His voice was soft, light, his breath hardly stirring into steam in the cold air. She nodded, solemn, holding the kitten to her chest.

He stood there for a long moment, still and silent as though incapable of making a sound. His hands—long, thin fingers—were splayed at his side, and he crouched as though he would sprint away if she made any movement. Though he never lifted his eyes, never shifted so she was in his sight, she felt like she was being watched—like a traveller raising a lantern to the glowing, frightened, starving eyes of a wolf in winter.

 “Thank you.”

A trembling whisper from her lips. The moment passed; the edge of his wide hat lifted to a narrow chin and lips turned up in a smile.

“Did you find it?" Lille called—Bri turned, then looked back; he was gone. The kitten gnawed at her knuckle with its gums and she shook her head, turning back to where Lille crossed to meet her.

"Is there someone back there?” Lille asked.

“No, no one,” Bri said, and pushed the squirming kitten into Lille’s hands. “Here—I found him.”

“Oh!" Smiling, she cooed at the little thing.

"He was in the hay," Bri said.

"Maker, this one’s so small,” Lille said, and laid a wet kiss to the tiny round of its head. It mewed, pitifully, its little eyes closed tight, its pinprick paws clinging to Lille’s fingers.

“We should put it with the others,” Bri said. They went back to where the kitchen cat lay with its litter, settled in the straw. Lille crouched to place the kitten among its siblings. Bri reached out, too, but drew her hand back when the cat swiped at her hand.

“She really is a mean one," Bri sighed, wringing her hands.

“Like Donatien.” Lille picked at the straw. “Like Fabien.”

“She looks like Fabien,” Bri said, watching as the cat’s pointed ears pinned back to its head. Lille laughed—light, shallow, swept up by the wind that rushed through the stables. She shivered.

“Let’s go inside,” she said, “I’m sure tomorrow Fabien will hiss and spit as much as the cat does, anyway.”

Bri reached out and took her hand, squeezing it gently, wary of the marks that split her skin.

“You’re all right?” she asked. Lille shrugged, then nodded.

“It’s nothing,” Lille said. “Not any worse than anything else, right? But—thanks for bringing me out. It's good to have you as a friend, Bri."

She leaned in and gave her those quick Orlesian kisses of fondness that only masked people would perform; a careful press of the cheeks, one then the other, light as if to avoid scratching the paint.

"You really helped," Lille said, and the smile Bri knew crept back again.


	3. Chapter 3

Orlesian pastry takes two days of work.

With dawn crisping just beyond the horizon Bri, sleepless, mounted the steps to the kitchens. The ravens trilled fretfully from the walls at the sight of another creature stirring at this dark hour besides the watchful soldiers who stalked the keep in shifts. The chantry bells had not yet tolled for morning but the moons had long since slipped below the mountaintops.

The kitchen was dark, cold, fires dead, the rounds of rising dough where she had left them the day before. She and Fabien had turned them out in silence. Tight tense silence—even Lille had strained blocks of butter from its clouded liquid without an ounce of gossip.

Bri built the hearth first, hands and knees, breathing embers into life, cheek against the stone. Then the fires in the ovens; when the light finally stretched its fingers across the kitchen tiles, she scrubbed her hands in the basin, then slipped her stained smock over her head and tied it tight behind her. She went to the shelf where the pot of dough, separate from the rest, had sat in the cold air overnight. Tipping it onto the table she kneaded it in her stiff hands, working it loose and pliant, pressing and folding with the perfunctory movements she knew. 

She rolled it flat. Then, a square of butter placed with same precision inside the rolled-out dough. She folded the sheets over this new layer and, picking up the rolling pin again, she flattened them together with quick strokes. She folded it again, then rolled, then folded and rolled again. Ten, fifteen, twenty times, mind numbed by the early hour. Her arms ached, stiff with cold. It kept the pastry chilled but made her shoulders tense.

A log, too fresh for the fire, popped and hissed; she turned to look, shaken out of her trace, and in the corner of the room she saw a figure crouched atop the stacks of flour.

“Oh!” she said, startled, dropping the sheet of dough on the counter.

That enormous hat with a brim that stretched to his shoulders. Hands tight at his chest. Patchwork clothes with seams staggering across the pieces. But he looked at her, now; his eyes, blue, peered out from under a scruff of hair blond and light as duck-fluff. Straw-colored eyelashes fluttered on his cheekbones. The firelight made the pale planes of his face look sallow, skin so light she could see the webbed veins that fanned just beneath.

Slowly, quietly, she let out a held breath.

“You’re that boy who—"

He moved—a simple shift in his weight, rocking on the balls of his feet. The sack of flour beneath him rustled.

"I—I—" His voice stumbled over the word; his eyes cast down.

"Do you need something?” she asked after a few heartbeats. “A glass of water? We—might have some bread and butter, if you’re hungry? Everyone’s still asleep.”

She wiped her hands on her smock, to hide the trembling in her fingers. The skirts beneath were smeared and cracked with streaks of dough and flour from the week’s work; no time for washing yet, clothes picked out in the dark.

“I don’t sleep,” he said, his voice plain. She laughed—light, airy, nervous—and nodded.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t sleep, either.” 

A moment of silence hung between them; the fire hissed.

“You probably shouldn’t be here,” she said, cautious. “The head cook doesn’t like you sneaking around. We were told to watch out for you.”

"I know. I—do things wrong, sometimes," he said, "and everyone remembers."

He held something to his chest—a jar, she saw, as he raised it up to her eyes.

“The honey?” She took it from his hands—a pale honeycomb, syrup pooled at the bottom. She took it and frowned. “There’s hardly any left.”

He looked away, picking at the threads of his frayed sleeves.

“Donatien was wrong,” she said, placing the jar on the table. “You're the one stealing food.”

“It’s harder, now,” he said swiftly from beneath the brim of his hat, “you all see me, but she likes honey in her wine, and I—”

"You shouldn't do that," she snapped—her voice cracked against the stone; he shook his head, rolling back and forth on his heels.

“He accused her,” he said, his voice a wisp, “he hit Lille with the willow switch when she ate a handful of cherries to make you laugh—he thought she had taken the plums the month before. Stinging fingers for split skin spoiled in the winter sun." He raised his eyes to hers and stilled. His voice had taken on the rushing sonorities of a river, as though it came from elsewhere than his thin, white throat. She felt, for a moment, heat rise to her cheeks. 

"You were watching us?"

"Yes," he said. "I'm sorry, I—I won’t take from the kitchen any more.”

The quick, airy quality had left him; he had dipped an idle hand into the waters and now left it just as easily. He sighed—a dog's sigh, a simple expulsion of breath inscrutable to her.

"I was trying to help. Testing, trying, a sweet to smooth a sharp taste. I got it wrong—I was glad you could help Lille. I'm sorry that I made her hurt."

His voice held such a curious measure in tone, shifting as he spoke, as though incapable of hiding anything he felt. Beneath the brim of his hat she could see pink-tipped cheeks, eyes that shifted uncomfortably as she looked; she looked away.

"If you need something you can ask," she said.

"I'll—try."

He ducked his head sharply in a nod—solemn, silent, secret; she nodded, too. They stood together, watching one another warily—he, perched on the pile of flour, she standing in her stained smock and staring.

“Do you want me to go?” He asked suddenly, his voice light and curious—she had glimpsed him in so many odd places she wondered if he had anywhere to go.

“I—don’t mind,” she said, “but I need to keep working. You can stay, if you like, though I don’t know why you’d want to.” He nodded with a dip of his hat—it caught her eye and she nearly breathed a short laugh at the sight.

"Thank you," he said, his voice a grateful whisper. He watched as she reached for her rolling pin again, one eye on him, until she turned back to the dough. It shone, pale and cold in the low light. Again she rolled it flat. She didn’t hear him approach, but she felt him beside her by the prickling hairs on her neck.

“I’m making blueberry tarts,” she said, steadying her voice, speaking as though she said aloud what she was thinking to herself. “They were the Divine’s favorite. Before—before she became Divine.”

“They still are,” he said. “She misses them. The cooks in Val Royeaux don’t make them the way you do.”

She dropped her eyes and pressed the corners of her smile to a flat line. The pastry fanned out flat before her on the table, waiting for her to shape it.

“They make people happy,” he continued, “they can’t heal the hurt but—it helps, it can hide for a moment—sticky-fingered forgetfulness, sweet sugared flowers full-flavored on the tongue. You don’t have to make them, but you do.”

“You make it sound so—” she paused, lost for words after the breadth of his own.

“It’s how it feels,” he said, succinctly.

Shut up in the kitchens, she rarely witnessed that little moment of delight the first bite of a familiar sweet could conjure. Sometimes someone would come down to the kitchens to thank them—the accompanying servants of visiting nobility, or one of the workmen who could mingle with them a little more freely than the other inhabitants of the keep. Fabien always nodded without comment, as though he expected it. Lille would laugh, and smile almost flirtatiously. Bri never knew how to respond, how to unpick the delight she felt and put it into words.

“You make them when you’re happy,” he said. She looked up. “You make them when you want to _be_ happy, too—which is it, today?”

She glanced from him to the pastry, worried that it was some expression, some movement of her fingers that had told him this. Shaking her head, she took up her knife from her apron, short and sharp, and slit the flattened dough into even squares.

“I—I don’t know,” she said as she worked. “I’ll tell you when they're done.”

He nodded. She made quick strokes and sliced the corners nearly to the center of each square. He watched as the knife flashed in the firelight, her fingers firm, the movements of her wrist precise. 

“I always fold them into pinwheels,” she said, and turned so he could better see as she lifted up one half of each cut section and pushed it into the center, the rest of the dough pointing out like a star. She did this for each one, one after the other, quick fingertips pressing into the layered dough.

“Do you want to try?” she asked, turning to him, hovering over the last square.

“Can I?” he asked, lifting his hands, staring at his fingers as though he posed them this question; she stepped back, nodding. He moved to stand at her side.

First he pinched the dough too firmly, nearly tearing it; he made a noise of fright—a whispered sorry—then tried again, picking up the corners lightly as though they were alive and carefully, cautiously, bending it towards its center; it flopped back into place.

“You can’t be too light or too firm,” she said.

“You have to know what it needs,” he said, staring at the square of dough, “needs kneading and knotting under fingers nicked by knives. Your hands feel what to do. You don’t even have to look.”

She nodded, slow, confused by his profusion of words. Quietly she reached over and, shoulder to shoulder with him, pressed the edges of each cut piece into the center the way she had showed him. Softly, as though he ran his fingertips over the fragile petals of a flower, he felt the shape of what she had made.

“Proud,” he said in a long breath. “You’re smiling." She turned and saw him watching her with keen interest, standing close. She took a shy step back. 

“You don’t smile very often,” he said, that same curious tone.

“No," she said, eyeing him, "maybe not.”

“But you want to,” he said. “Smile more.”

“Who doesn’t?” she asked, and he seemed to ponder the question—his eyes unfocused, head tilted as though he listened to a distant sound. She moved to a wrapped round of soft, dry cheese on the table, and crumbled pieces with her fingers into the centre of each star.

“Can you bring me the compote?” she asked, nodding towards a jar that sat on a shelf near the door; he looked up, thoughts broken, and moved to bring it to her. She unstopped the jar and smeared a swirl of violet over the white. Then she snatched two eggs from a basket on the table and cracked them swiftly into a bowl, whisking them with a fork. Taking up a bristled brush she grazed the branching arms of the pastries with the egg. The familiar movements were a comfort; they were ready to be baked—the oven crackled with heat. She grabbed her smock and briskly opened the oven door, sliding the first tray inside.

“It’s quick,” she said, as though he had asked. Always something to do—she turned and went to the corner of the room, where sacks of flour were stacked haphazardly, where he had been crouched, watching; she unpicked one and plunged a bowl inside, scooping up a pile of the stuff.

“Half the bread on the tables are yours,” he said suddenly; she reached for a jar that sat on the worktable, against the wall. 

“The other half are Fabien’s.”

She nodded; with a knife she scraped a slurry of wet and bubbling flour into the bowl with the rest, then clasped the jar shut again. Then, a pinch of salt, and she poured water over all of it and dug her outstretched fingers into the bowl.

"It starts in the air," he said, "drawn by the flour, feeding, fleeting—it's different wherever you are."

"Oh—the yeast?" she said, glancing up at the jar. Her elbow jutted out as she stirring roughly at the new dough with one hand, the other arm holding the bowl to her chest. "Fabien brought that from Val Royeaux."

"What you're making now is for the other servants?" he asked, though his voice had hardly turned up in a question. She nodded. The dough she and Fabien had made the night before, swelling overnight, sat in bowls in rows by the fire.

"It's nicer if we get something that isn't stale by the time we get to eat in the evening." She turned it out onto the worktable.

The rhythmic kneading of the dough was the only sound between them. Under his curious eyes, in her practised hands, it changed and shone smooth and even in the light.

“You turn things into more than what they were before.” He spoke swiftly. “It makes you happy. It’s satisfying, simple—”

“Simple!” she said, voice sharp. He shook his head, raising his hand as though to stop himself from speaking.

“No—no, I didn’t mean—I’m sorry.” He said it so earnestly, his eyes wide and pleading, that she softened.

“It’s simple because your hands know. The pastries always come out right because you know with more than just your head. It helps, that something comes out right every time. Clear comforting cadence. I—“ he paused for a moment, unsure. “I don’t have anything like that anymore. I’m still—learning.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. He looked at her, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his hat, but she could just see the mirrors of his gaze and not behind them. He moved as if to speak, his mouth opened, but before he could make a sound she jumped to some internal clock and swiftly wiped her hands on her smock, moving to the oven door.

“They can come out now.” She wrapped her hands in her smock again and pulled the oven open; delicate leaves of pastry, warm stars that crisped at the edges, the fragile scent of blueberries and behind that, the scant savor of the soft cheese.

“Ah, do you smell that?” she said, a whisper almost to herself, her eyes bright over the tray as she laid it on the table.

Briskly she plucked each pastry up and placed them to cool on a wire rack. He watched, carefully, as she sucked at her fingers, skin so used to singeing she could barely feel it. She picked up the second tray and placed it in the oven. Crouched at the door, her hands wrapped in her skirts, she sighed—a trailing, contented breath.  She wished, in this moment, that everything could be as simple to her as making these.

“I want to see how other people do it.” He said. She was quiet, turning to watch him as he spoke. “Be happy, help the hurt—others and their own. You give little pieces of you that you hope make people happy.  I want to know. I want to be more than what I was before.”

The hearth had burned down to embers and a few licks of flame; shadowed crowded his face. Confused by his words, she moved to put another log on the fire, hoisting the heavy piece of wood and dropping it with a shower of sparks on the low fire. She stood, and smoothed soot and flour from her smock. She did not know what to say to him.

“I—I’m the first one here,” she said. “To light the fires and start the baking. The others come later, after they’ve cleared the hall and dealt with the merchants. Lille should be here with the milk soon, and Fabien with more water, and we’re expecting a pallet of eggs today—”

“I can come back,” he said. “You can remember me now. Your eyes stick, and so does your smile. It’s good when you smile.”

She twisted the hem of her smock, her eyes dropping nervously.

“If you like. As long as no one sees you.” She saw him shift his weight from one foot to the other.

“They won’t. I can still be quiet.”

“All right, then,” she said, and moved to the table. Taking up one of the fresh-baked pastries she tore it in half, the crisp layers cracking apart. She held one of the pieces out to him, warm beneath her floured fingers. “Here.” 

“I don’t—”

“First one of the day.” Hesitating for a moment, he reached out and took it from her. Lille's hands would heal—the sweet pastry held the scent of summer in it.

“Thank you.” He said it with the same clear sincerity, light and guileless. It warmed her; still, he didn’t bring it to his lips—just held it, awkwardly, standing in the middle of the kitchen like a wild bird suddenly caged. She could not fathom him being afraid of her.

“I'll talk to you again,” he said, “if you want me to.” He held the torn half of the pastry tightly to his chest. The compote stained his fingertips blue.

She wrung her hands, the fire at her back, and nodded. “All right.”

His smile was wide, toothy—she met it, soft, quiet, like a slip of light on the horizon.

“You didn’t say,” he started, looking to her—staring just past her eyes—as he crumbled the pastry crust in his fingers. “Did you make them because you’re happy, or because you want to be happy?”

The second batch of pastries crisped and curled in the oven, while the first cooled on the counter. She held her half she had shared with him in her hand, warm, sticky-fingered, shining.

“I’m happy."

A lingering look, his eyes wide and darting across her features as though he sought something far away—then he slipped through the door into the keep. She ate her half slowly, savoring; the red light of a late dawn was stretching, curling across the mountaintops beyond the fortress’s walls. It crept beneath the courtyard door; she crossed to it, and lifted the latch to let in the dawn. The air, crisp, struck her first, then the sharp winter sunlight. The mountains were jagged teeth against a sky brightening clear and blue. She breathed in the cold until her skin pricked.

"Briony!" Fabien called, at the base of  the stairs; his back was bent as he hauled two heavy buckets of water to the kitchens. "Take one of these."

She jumped to his side and took one of the sloshing buckets—together they hauled them up to the kitchen. She went immediately to the oven, drawing out the last tray of pastries. Fabien put down the water and looked, brow furrowed, as Bri placed the second batch beside the first.

"Why did you make these?" he asked. "Who are they for?"

"For us," she said, "and anyone who wants them." Twelve stars laid out on the table, filling the room with their sweet scent. Fabien frowned.

"I already had one," Bri said. He walked to the table, leaning over them, inspecting, appraising. Bri opened her mouth to speak, but Lille came through the door, kicking it open with her heel—she carried a pail of milk in her arms, her fingertips white with cold.

She lowed, laughing, from behind the tall tin container as she teetered towards them. Bri went to shut the door behind her; when Lille laid the heavy pail on the table she grew silent—Fabien did not look at her. Beyond the door the ravens cawed, disturbed by some morning passerby, and their cracked calls reached them.

Then Lille spied the tarts, and gave a hum of laughter through a smile, her lips pressed together in delight.

"Did you make these?" she asked. Bri nodded. Lille reached over with scabbed fingers, her hand hovering.

"Can I?" she asked, hesitant—Bri nodded again, and she snatched it up with a wide smile. She and Fabien both watched as she ate; how her eyes closed, how she sighed as she chewed. When her eyes opened again she looked to Fabien, who stepped back as though afraid.

"Have one," she said. She gave him a smile—warm, soft. "Go on."

His eyes darted about the room for a moment and then he did as he was bid, taking one from the table. He held it for a long moment, as though inspecting it again—then took a bite, and Bri watched the tremble in the corner of his mouth.

"Thank you," Lille said. With hesitation, Fabien nodded.

"Yes," he said, though with the same tone he used for everything. "Thank you, Bri."

Bri smiled, looking away. Lille reached for another but pressed it into Bri's hands; she clutched at it, surprised.

"I've already—" she started, but stopped herself with a small, happy sigh.

Together, they ate the sticky, still-warm pastries in the brief quiet of the dawn.

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Another dawn broke on another morning's work. The courtyard door, cracked to the cold of the winter's day, let in the watery light that slid across the tiles as the kitchen grew oppressively warm by the ovens’ fire. Draughts of cold air came from the open door; it chilled the sweat on the bakers’ necks, made their arms prick with gooseflesh, roused their minds lulled by the scent of fresh bread; sweet rolls lay in rows on the table, fragrant and cooling.

Fabien shaped each strand of dough in deft palms and knotted them into rounds. He placed them on the tray as Lille, quick-footed, alert, ran between each oven to replace lines of fresh-baked twists with a new crop of dough as he turned them out. Bri chopped brine-soaked olives from Nevarra to fold into a savoury bread, alongside shreds of Antivan cheese and slices of onion whose acrid stench made her eyes water. Dough, coarser stuff than the brioche they pulled from the ovens, sat closer to the fire waiting and welling for the ovens to burn hotter for thicker crusts.

The same, each day: the loaves of bread, the pastries, the same rhythm of their kneading that stirred Skyhold to life every morning. Their hands were a heartbeat at the castle’s core, vital but invariable. The little thefts—the honey, the bits of old bread, once an entire wheel of cheese—had broken the monotony of the months of work, even if it shortened the head cook’s temper. And that strange boy, the little thief, had waited for her that morning three days before—crouched in the corner of the kitchen clutching the stolen jar—and watched so attentively, cared about Lille’s hurts, thanked Bri for all she had done to help—asked to come see her again. It had made her feel, briefly, as though she were more than just a pair of hands.

Bri stood, chopping olives in silence and, just for a moment, she didn't see the fall of the knife; it slit her finger open from nail to knuckle for her inattention.

She yelped, stepping back, her knife left on the table with its little smear of blood—it welled at the cut as she tried to pinch it closed. She bit her lower lip. It wasn’t just the soldiers who benefitted from Skyhold’s smithy; the kitchen knives were always sharp.

"What's happened?" Fabien snapped; his hands hovered over the half-woven ropes of dough. Lille looked to her, wiping sweat from her brow with the corner of her smock.

“It’s nothing," Bri said, shaking her head, eyes tightly shut. "Just a small cut. Nothing.”

Knives and fire—they were used to these daily hazards. Bri went to a shelf where a little pot of elfroot paste sat beside a knot of clean rags; she wound one around her finger as Lille drew close. Her voice dropped to a whisper as Fabien, his back to them, kneaded another ball of dough.

“When did you get here?” Lille asked—Bri shrugged, tucking the edge of the makeshift bandage beneath itself.

“Before sunup, like always.”

“And you’ve been stuck in here since? Bri, if you don’t get some sunshine you’ll wilt.”

“I’m not a plant,” Bri said. The cut was shallower than it looked, but long and stung from the olives’ salt. 

“Go get some air,” Lille said, and nodded to the olives. “I can do this.”

“I’ll get more water,” Bri said. Lille rolled her eyes.

“At least go to the healers.”

“I’m not going to bother them over a kitchen scrape,” she said. “They have other things to deal with—yesterday I saw one of the soldiers brought up with a smashed shoulder.”

“I heard about that,” Lille said, and shook her head. “It wasn’t a training accident—his friends dared him to climb the rocks up the mountainside when he was drunk. He fell.”

“Look, it’s nothing, really,” Bri held up her bandaged hand. “And if I went to the healers every time I got cut, how would anyone know I worked in the kitchen?”

“Proper chef, you,” Lille said, and smiled. Bri had never worked alongside mages—her fingers had long streaks of thin, shimmering scars from similar moments of distraction.

“Quit whispering and get back to work!" Fabien snarled, twisting tight at the dough in his hands. Lille gave him an obsequious bow, then moved back to crouch before the oven again, pulling out the last of the rolls.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Bri said, and took the empty water jug and left before Fabien could protest.

She hurried down the steps. The well by the courtyard was already in use by one of the stablehands, who hoisted bucket after bucket for the beasts' scum-crusted trough. Clicking her tongue in disappointment, Bri pulled her cloak closer and picked her way up the ice-slicked steps to the battlements.

The wind howled; the soldiers who marched their morning rotations along the walls gritted their teeth and leaned a shoulder into the cold as it swept across the stones. The servants always braved it without layers of armor, huddling, hunched, heaving forward; there were few so early in the day but Bri passed some of them—messengers mostly, and the maids who kindled hearthfires. The long route to the cloister, passing through the towers with their stone owls staring from the windows. Down in the garden it was calmer, shielded from the wind, last night's thin sheet of freshly fallen snow untouched in the dormant flowerbeds. The sun had only just risen and had yet to edge over the mountaintops; the light was frail, the walls leaving long shadows across the garden. The well here was free for Bri to use; she went to it.

The bucket, shining with a crust of ice, sat atop it; she lifted the wooden latch on the well, letting the jug sit on its stone edge. She fumbled with the rope, unknotting the tangle some careless person had left. Her fingers were numb from the cold; she brought them up to warm them with her breath, her eyes glancing about the near-empty courtyard, and then she saw him by the cloister wall, ankle-deep in the snow, digging as if to reach the flowerbed that lay beneath.

That same strange boy—he crouched, all knees and elbows, pushing handfuls of snow aside, the brim of his hat nearly skimming the ground as he worked, bent-backed, focused. He hadn’t seen her; he didn’t seem to see anything. Bri took a few halting steps towards him, the snow crunching underfoot. Her throat tightened in the cold air.

“Good morning,” she said in a short breath; he looked up, and stared at her with a frisson of shock.

"G-Good morning," he answered, with the same intonation as if he mimicked her. His lips were dry, chapped, his ears and tip of his nose red with the chill. He wore only the patched clothes she had always seen him wear.

 “You’re—not cold?”

He considered it. “I don’t think so,” he said. His nailbeds were a dull, bloody blue; it made her wince. They were bitten to jagged nubs, edged with dirt and the black crust of dried blood. She looked away as he dug them into the snow again.  

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Helping,” he answered. He had uncovered a patch of earth; he unpicked the knot at a pouch at his belt and spilled a scattering of seeds into his hand, little white knots Bri recognized as bulbs of crystal grace, flowers for warmer weather and softer ground. He buried them, then covered it over with the same forgetful snow until it looked like he had never been there.

It wouldn't grow; she knew that. Most of the garden herbs grew in pots, some strong enough for the cold air but others had been brought indoors for the winter months. Still, there were always little, hardier flowers when the weather turned: pink curls, slashes of violet, and the best those mountains blossoms, little clusters of dark blue flowers they called _myosotis_ in Orlesian but here _forget-me-nots_. More rustic poetry in the common tongue.

“You’re thinking of the spring,” he said, and looked up at her. Shakily, he stood in the snow. “I am, too.”

The sky was a bare blue, cloudless, the dawn light finally edging over the white-lined mountains; the garden brightened as the day began. Aware of his eyes, she stiffly turned back to the well.

“I think everyone’s thinking of spring this time of year,” she said, fumbling again with her task. Finally, she secured the rope and lowered the bucket to the water below. She glanced back to him; he had come closer, his shoes barely making impressions in the snow.

“No,” he said, and shook his head; the brim of his hat flopped from side to side. “Not everyone. It can be hard to hear sometimes but you’re—clear. Like a pane of glass over a painting.”

The rope tightened in her hand as the pail filled. He stood beside her, his eyes downcast, his head tilted as though the whisper of rushing water in the well's depths were words he could understand.

"I—" she began, her brow furrowed, shaking her head. "I don't know what you mean by that."

"No, no," he said again, more quickly this time. "It's good! Clean, uncluttered, cares closed but not knotted—Oh."

He fell, suddenly, silent.

"I'm sorry," he said. "They say I say odd things sometimes. But how am I supposed to know they're odd until after I say them?"

He was picking at the loose threads in his gloves, that same little frantic habit as though his mind worked too quickly for his body.

“No, it's—" she stopped short when the rope nearly slipped from her grasp. The boy stepped forward and gripped it with one hand, catching it before the stream rushed it away. Together, they hoisted up the brimming bucket; it sloshed and spilled as he helped her place it on the well's edge.

"Thank you," Bri said, and poured icy water into the jug she had carried from the kitchens. Her cut had reopened beneath the cloth, the bandage streaked with a slash of red; she rubbed at her palms, sore from where the rope slipped.

He was still standing beside her, silent, his hat obscuring his face down to the point of his chin.

"You were busy this morning, and—it was good, talking to you. Nobody talks to me anymore." 

His voice rushed and skittered like a dead leaf trembling in the breeze, unfixed, untethered, his fingers wringing together as he swayed on the balls of his feet. Bri held the heavy jug of water in her hands, watching him shift nervously before her eyes. Always alone, always watching from some perch as the castle woke and worked and went to bed—she wondered when someone had last spoken to him.

"What were you saying before?" she asked, voice gentle. "About the spring?"

He smiled softly from beneath the brim of his hat. The snow at their feet cast in a pale gold as the dawn light slipped over the garden wall.

"You miss the flowers. The forget-me-nots won’t bare their blossoms yet—but there are snowdrops in the valley. Little pale petals pushing through the ice. And you miss the bees, too. The furry ones that only make honey for themselves.”

Bri nodded; his words clustered together in the air, sounds slipping together, spoken as though he were reading something aloud.

"There's a hive somewhere," she offered. "In the garden—under one of the flowerbeds." They would sleep through the winter, huddled in the earth.

“I like the bees. They’re like me—they help, they turn flowers into fruit, but they sting if you try to swat them.” He lifted his eyes, blue as a sheen of ice.“I do that too.”

She had seen the dagger at his belt, its strange, wicked edge so unlike her kitchen knives. Sharper—the cut at her finger stung in the cold.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. She looked to him, startled that her uneasiness had been so plain. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

“I’m not—I don’t think you will,” she said, tripping over the words. “I have to be going back to the kitchen now.”

He nodded, but didn’t turn to leave. Bri clutched at the jug of water, heavy in her arms.

“I’ll—I’ll talk to you again." 

His eyes, which had darted back and forth as he spoke, now settled on her once more, soft, smiling.

“You will,” he said in a held breath. She shivered as a breeze swept past, fluttering the hem of her cloak and the wisps of blond hair that edged from beneath his hat. His eyes were owlish and bright, fringed with pale lashes, just visible. Bri nodded, and he mimicked her again. Turning away, she padded down the icy path to the door, the jug held in cautious hands, afraid to spill.

She didn't know his name—she looked back sharply. Find him again, ask—but when she looked she saw he had vanished that same soundless way that made her breath catch, as though he had dissolved into the light that glanced across the courtyard's stones.

Her fingers were red with cold as they throttled the neck of the water jug; the pain dragged her back to her task. Quickly, quietly, she hunched her shoulders and pushed through the door to the keep's hall.

Warmth—the braziers burned bright even at the early hour. The high ceilings, the light that patterned the floor through the stained glass, the statues holding bowls of fire below the gleaming eye of the Inquisition that hung from every banner. Bri kept her head down as she passed beneath them, keeping close to the wall as a handful of pilgrims spoke in whispers in the torchlight. The Inquisitor's throne was empty; Bri glanced to it as she opened the next door with her hip, to where the cellar stairs descended.

The door to Lady Montilyet's office opened just as Bri moved into the passage.

"Oh!" Bri jumped back, the water sloshing over the edge of the jug and hitting the floor with a slap. Her smock was drenched—she ducked her head down as the nobleman, his face a shining mask, muttered to himself as he stepped over the water she had spilled and into the hall beyond. The gemstones at his fingers glittered—the heels of his boots clicked against the stones.

"I do apologize, Your Grace,"Lady Montilyet said quickly. "This way, if you please." She glanced to Bri before following her guest with that tight, clipped walk all the servants knew by now as one of annoyance.

Bri said nothing, only held the jug to her chest, head bent low, until her neck ached and the diplomat and dignitaries and two sneering servants had crossed into the other room, the heavy door hitting the frame hard behind them. Breathless, Bri hurried down the steps to the cellars and crossed the cold, cavernous room back to where she belonged.

The day passed with its same tides, its lulls between the rush of mealtimes, until the fires were put out and the bakers were the last in the kitchens to knead tomorrow’s bread. Hearth clear of ash, bread dough rising, glossy egg whites swirling in a bowl, drying in the chill air. Beyond the door, the night's sky was clouded with the promise of snow.

"Right," Lille said, wiping her hands on the hem of her smock before pulling it over her head. "That's me done."

Fabien had already left for the evening. Bri laid the last bowl of dough in its row before she, too, untied her stained smock and threw it, with Lille’s, in a basket by the cellar door for the washerwoman to collect.

“Lots for the horses,” Lille said, nodding to the scrap buckets.

“Let’s bring them their desserts, then.” Bri took one up, and Lille did the same. They descended the steps together and crossed the courtyard to the stables. 

The nanny goat, a spitting, snorting thing, waddled past them; they gave it a wide berth. Many of Skyhold's inhabitants had come to the Inquisition through odd or convoluted means, though none but the goat had been flung so literally into its path. Still, it supplied them with rank cheese and in the summers kept the grasses in the courtyard trim. Now it merely snuffed the snow, kicking it with its teardrop hooves, and kept company with the stables’ other residents.

The horses had all been shut up for the night, and the ostlers had finished their work and gone. One horse, intrigued by the sounds outside, came up to the stable door and hung its head over to look. Its snorted steam, its ears swivelling forward as they approached. With one impossibly large, brown eye it stared at them.

"I guess he's the lucky one," Lille said, and dragged the bucket of scraps to where the horse stood. It stomped its hoof impatiently. There was a hook on the door; she hung the bucket and the horse's head dipped down and jammed its nose into it.

Bri left hers on another stall's hook. Lille was stroking the hungry horse's nose.

"Fabien keeps leaving early," Lille said, her voice an idle loll. The horse snorted into its meal; Lille laughed, light and quiet.

"I didn't notice," Bri said. "Why, do you think?"

"Maybe he's met someone," Lille said. "Sneaking off to be with his sweetheart after work."

"Really?"

"No," Lille said flatly. Bri gave a short laugh, and shook her head.

"That can't be true, anyway—he's been more irritated than usual," she said.

"Do _you_ think we're that bad?" Lille asked, giving the horse a final pat on its star-patterned forehead. It snorted again in response—she giggled.

The fire pit in the barn had burned down to glowing embers. Bri crossed to the worktable; the collection of toy soldiers had grown, some painted with the blue and white insignia of the Grey Wardens, some still rough shields and faces cut into the wood. Carefully Bri picked one up, ran her fingertips over its staunch, gaunt expression—she could not help but smile.

She placed it back with the others, the rank and file, all facing the same direction, then she turned to join Lille again. The edge of her vision flickered—on the landing above, watching in silence, she saw a pair of blue eyes peering from beneath a familiar hat. Her breath caught, and he slipped away from sight.

"Time for bed?" Lille called from the stables.

"Go on," Bri said. "I'll be there soon."

"Oh, don't go back to the kitchen!" Lille said, shaking her head, throwing her arms up in mock despair. "Everything's packed up—just go to sleep!"

"I have a few more things to do."

There was a short silence. Lille watched her for a long moment.

"Don't stay up too late." Her voice had dropped to a thin sigh.

"I won't," Bri said. "Please don't worry."

They said goodnight. Lille shrugged, sighed again, and stomped through the snow to the courtyard stairs.

Bri looked back to the landing and, cautiously, went up the steps to where she had seen him. He was there, in the corner, cross-legged on the wooden floor by a cluster of hay. A lantern perched atop one of the bales, and a disheveled stack of papers clustered on the floor beside him. The clouds had covered over the profusion of moonlight and so the little flame was the only point of light in the room; it flickered over the pale planes of his face, drawing odd shadows, casting him in a warmer glow than the cold gleam had that morning. A little pot of ink was at his elbow; he did not look up as she approached, only continued scratching carefully at a page with a pen, huddled over his makeshift desk.

Despite the morning's promise she did not know what to say to him. Here, in the barn, the castle half-asleep—it was a silence to which she was unaccustomed in the press and crackle of the kitchens, where everything called for her attention. His fingers were all stained with ink, now, smudges of black that went up to his gloves. The pen was poorly cut, sloppily scratching across the page.

He looked up—she took a short step back when his eyes fell upon her, spine straight, hands twisting in the folds of her worn cloak.

"I'm glad you came to talk to me," he said, a clear note in his voice. "You didn't have to, and—sometimes people forget me."

"I—I don't know how they could,” she said. She bit her lip when his eyes widened, as though frightened by the thought. She shook her head.

"What are you doing up here?" she asked, untangling her hands from her cloak. She'd always seen him perched in such high places.

"I'm writing a letter," he said. "Blackwall helps me sometimes but he's not here tonight."

"The Warden? Well—it's a little cold to be in the barn," she said.

"The horses don't mind."

“No, I—you’re right.”

Quietly, she moved and sat beside him, her legs tucked under her. He had put down his pen, the little feathered nub bleeding a thin trickle of ink.

"Who are you writing to?" she asked.

"Varric," he said. "He taught me how, when he was here."

Months ago the servants in her dormitory had clustered a few evenings a week to listen to one of the messengers read _Hard in Hightown_ aloud for them. Bri had always listened idly, coming in late too often to catch the story as it passed, and had never heard the ending.

“I like writing," he said. "I like words—you say them and they’re real, but the wisp wanes in the wind and it’s gone, smoke and a memory. Like me. Like I was.”

Bri twisted at the hem of her skirt, confused, his voice rushing over her.

“Writing words makes them realer. They’re there, ink on a page, a reflection—a reminder. _Remember the dream_. Like me. Like how—I want—to be. I’m sorry,” he said with sudden feeling. She looked at him, his eyes bright in the thin firelight. “I say things as though they’ll be forgotten, float away, finished. I’m more careful in my letters.”

He held out the page to her and she looked at it; her eyes skipped along the scratched and stuttering marks.

“It—" she began, and then looked away. “I don’t know how to read. A few words, but—not this.”

“Oh,” he said, and looked down at his black scratches on the page. “I couldn’t, either. I didn’t see why I had to. But I think I know why, now—I’m still learning. Do you want me to read it to you? I can.”

He looked to her and smiled, his shoulders straight, sitting taller. She glanced at the page again, nervous.

“I thought letters were private.”

“Private?” He shook his head, brow furrowed. “But they're made for other people.”

"Well," she said, and nodded. "Alright, then."

One corner of his mouth picked up in a smile as he raised the half-written letter to the light.

“It says ‘Hello Varric. This Is Cole. Not The Paper, But The Person Writing On It. I Am Well. I Am Practising Like You Asked.’” He emphasized the words, careful of each one, as though he crossed a river on stepping stones. He laid it in his lap, smoothing the sheet with reverent palms. Some of the marks had already smudged into stains, their meaning lost.

“I don’t know if I’ve spelled everything right. Writing sounds is difficult. Saying them is easier. But Varric’s not here—he went back to Kirkwall. This wasn’t his home.”

"I'm sorry," she offered. He looked to her.

"Oh, don't be," he said, "I know he's—happier, where he is now. And he remembers me—called me _kid_ , kept me safe, cared. Tried to teach me things. Tried to be a better brother. I want him to be happy."

"Still," she said. For a moment she was quiet, then she glanced to him and blushed.

“I forgot to ask—your name is Cole?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I forget to say—yes. I’m Cole.”

“I’m Briony. Well, Bri.”

“Bri,” he repeated, “Brief, breeze, breathe. Light and unencumbered. Enough room. Enough distance.”

A confused flicker of a smile; “I know how to write it,” she said.

“Show me!” Cole asked, excited. She smiled, shy of herself, and took the pen he offered. In short, small strokes she scratched the pieces of her name in the corner of his letter. A smudge of ink settled on her thumb; she rubbed at it as he picked up the sheet to look.

“B-R-I,” he named each one. “It could be spelled B-R-E-E, or B-R-I-E. But it’s not. I don't know why. Do you?”

“No,” she said. “It’s not—well it’s not an Orlesian name. My mother was from the Free Marches."

They were silent for a moment. The letters of her name stood out to her from the page

"Can you write your name?” she asked.

He nodded, and took up his pen again; he cut the letters of his own name with ink into the margin of the other side of the paper.

“C-O-L-E,” he read.

“Cole,” she repeated, and stared firmly at the letters; a wide arc that seemed to encircle the rest of them—a dot, a line, a curl. She glanced across the page.

“What’s the rest?” she asked, and pointed to the tight, cluttered lines of writing that covered it. His eyes unfocused.

“This one made him sad,” Cole said.

“Made who sad?”

“Cullen. He sent ten men into the the wilderness to kill darkspawn coming from a cave—no more Wardens, it falls to us, pitch-black keening from the core of the earth, _Maker save us, Maker_ —seven letters, seven pieces of gold to pay in penitence for the lives lost to his incompetence.”

“That’s what it says?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“It’s how it feels,” he said. “Whenever Cullen looked at it it made him sad. So I took it away. I’m trying to—make it better. But it’s so loud, and my writing is—not as loud.”

“You steal more than just honey, then,” she said. He looked at her, holding the pen up in his ink-streaked hands, his eyes wide and pale in the low light.

“Did I do it wrong?” he said, his voice trembling. “I didn't mean—should I give it back?”

“No—no,” she said, and shook her head, “I don't—no. It’s better this way, I think. He doesn’t need the paper anymore.”

“Oh,” he said, and looked back to his large, scratched handwriting. “Good!”

Always relief in his voice when he said that word—everything he did was for other people.

"You want to ask me a question," he said, breaking her thoughts; she looked at him and shook her head.

“I don't—well." She paused, her eyes downcast. "I do. Can you—write something for me?”

“Maybe,” he said, “I think I can. I can try. What do you want me to write?”

“I think the Divine needs the right sweets,” she said, wringing her hands in her skirts again. “So I’d like to write down the way the tarts are made, to send to her. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” he said brightly, and laughed. “It would help! I’d be glad to do that.”

She smiled. Recounting the recipe, she watched him write it into words on another stolen sheet of paper. Some measurements were inexact—known by sight or scent alone. He stopped his frantic scribbling for a moment.

"They measure it the same way," he said. "Handfuls, dashes, pinches—could judge in the cup of your palm but not a real cup. Knowing what it needs. They do it too."

"I hope so," she said and picked at the flour beneath her fingernails. She continued, and when he had finished he laid the page flat on the haybale for the ink to dry in the cold air. Bri shivered.

"I should go," she said. She moved to stand, her legs stiff beneath her.

"Wait." He raised his eyes to her and nearly brought a hand to touch her wrist; he stopped short, holding it in the air. Quickly he reached and fumbled for a moment at his belt—then he held the round biscuit to the light. A knot of dried fruit and slivered nuts held together with honey, a smear of chocolate at its back; she'd made them that afternoon for one of the visiting nobles, thirteen pretty pieces on a tray. But its lacy edge was gone, worn down by the day, bent oddly in his pocket.

"Where did you—"

“You didn’t get to eat one,” he said quickly; a frown creased the corners of her mouth. “The recipe was too exact—don’t worry, the Duke didn’t notice.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said, and shook her head. “You shouldn’t have taken it. I told you not to take anything from the kitchen—I could have been in trouble.”

“But they weren't in the kitchen," he protested. “They were in Josephine’s office.”

Bri felt a chill grip her chest at the thought of Lady Montilyet pursing her lips in discontent when she noticed the baker’s dozen biscuits she had asked for had one less than custom demanded.

“She didn’t—”

“I don’t bake for me.” Bri said it more sharply than she intended. Cole went quiet, his shoulders falling, the biscuit held delicately in his limp hands.

“You do,” he said, but his eyes slid away. “I’m sorry. I got it wrong.”

“Oh,” she sighed. She took the treat from his hands; it had nearly crumbled to nothing in his pocket. He looked up when her fingertips brushed his.

“Thank you, Cole," she said, the chocolate melting in her palm. "I’m glad you thought of me. Just—don’t do it again.”

“Think of you?” he asked. She gave a short, breathy laugh.

“No, I—” she shook her head. “I meant just—try not to get me in trouble.”

"I'm sorry,” he said again, voice low.

"It's all right." With a curling crack she snapped the biscuit in half and handed him a piece. Again he took it, and again he merely held it to his chest, fingers all splotched with ink.

"You share everything you have."

"I don't have much." She brought the biscuit to her mouth and bit; it had gone stale in the hours since she had made them but the chocolate warmed her, and the dried cranberries were bright on her tongue. The night was calm, quiet. The breeze stirred the candle, a gentle flicker. For a long moment there was no sound but Cole's breath and the crunch of the biscuit as she ate.

"Thank you," he said again, a quiet breath in the air. "For the biscuit and—for talking to me."

Too soon it passed, the sweet moment gone, eaten up. Bri stood and gave him a quick, skittish nod. The lamplight flickered, threatening to go out, but then stilled and grew firm and clear again in the darkness. Cole was motionless, watching her with that same nervous energy—wide, prey's eyes, fearful, full of doubt. She smiled, tentative, trying; he smiled in return, edged with warm light.

The sky was still thickly clouded over, and the embers in the stable's fire pit had finally whispered to dead ash. In the darkness she picked her way back to the stairs. She could barely see; she felt her way down each step, the flame from Cole's lantern a small, obscured point whose fingers of light could not reach here. The horses were quiet, the sky still a silent threat of snow, even the guards above paced without sound. Then, a crackle of hay underfoot beneath the stairs. Careful, she looked for the noise, touching the worktable for guidance—a figure crouched, obscured.

“Fabien?”

“Maker!” Fabien yowled, jumping back as if struck—she could only make out his thin, lank frame in the night, shivering, arms crossed tight over his chest.

"Are you all right?" she asked. He passed his sleeve over his eyes, a mineral green in the low light.

"You frightened me!" he snarled.

"I'm sorry, I—"

" _Why_ are you here?" He leaned closer, shoulders hunched. It was the kitchen voice, a tone shouted above a spitting fire or the ceaseless fall of knives. When she wasn't quick enough shaping the dough, or if the biscuits she had baked had burnt edges. His sharp question followed too close to the quiet of the hayloft; she shook her head, and looked away. She'd crouched where Fabien now stood, and had plucked the kitten from Cole's hands, then later the jar of honey he had stolen from them. The cracked biscuit, the torn half of pastry—memories. She did not want to share those moments.

"Why are _you_ here?" she asked. Fabien cleared his thin throat in disgust.

"I don't answer to _you_. Get back to the dormitory."

"Fine." Bri bundled herself in her cloak. "Goodnight, then."

Fabien said nothing. Turning away, Bri hurried past the horses, the beasts staring with their brown eyes, stirred from their sleep by Fabien's snarls. When she had crossed the courtyard she looked over her shoulder to see if she could spy Cole again, but the lantern in the hayloft had gone out, and the little point of warmth swallowed up by the night.

 


	5. Chapter 5

A nest of wild rabbits squirmed in the frozen earth of the lower courtyard. Pink and mottled bodies writhing, too young, furless, featureless, their eyes closed to the dark, the entrance to their little hovel shut tight with a plug of snow. Some bird of prey that nested in a Skyhold eave had darted down and snatched their snarling mother up. Feet kicking, teeth biting at the bird’s legs until it was pinned against the battlements, first by claws dug into fur and fat and then the final, brutal beak.

The season made prey scarce; the keep’s inhabitants made it scarcer. The bird would have waited for the kits to grow to take them one by one but its own hunger spurred it to snatch the mother up for a moment’s meal. They would die—a week’s time, less—without their mother’s warmth, without the sustenance of her body. Helpless, they lay within the tomb of their birth.

It was night. Braziers, their flames fasted down to ash, were emptied of their dead cinders. Icicles hung in thick tines from eaves and arches, glinting, glistening. There was no wind—black shadows were still over the silver snow. The trees stood perfect, silent. White as bones bleached by time. The black sky, a darkness unlit by any stars, seemed so close, barely arching above but instead bearing down on his shoulders. Beneath him the ground was as hard as iron.

The rabbits mewled and squirmed in their frozen burrow; he felt each squealing mind under him. He scratched at the dirt, fingers bruised to the bone. His palms, scraped by sharp ice, bled. His mouth was dry, lips cracked, insides that same writhing hollow as the helpless creatures. The pain opened him to the memory of a belly that hurt like knives, of a throat cracked dry, of a blade slipped too easily between two ribs. When he could not save a dying thing, when he could not save himself.

The earth opened up beneath him. They were there; the pain was loud. It split the night. It cracked inside his bones. The old songs had softened to a whisper. The loss gripped him—made every muscle taut to trembling—abandoned to the silence of living in a world that never listened.

Faintly, his name—the name he had taken, the name he had slipped into like the skin he wore; he raised his head, gave a shuddering sigh, pulled by unseen strings. Brief, breathe, breeze—she stood in the snow before him, shallow breaths clouding the air, her cheeks burning red in the cold.

They met during the cracks in the day—dark spaces—before the light glanced over the walls, or long after it slipped behind the mountaintops; bright points that shimmered in her memory like flakes of snow too light to fall. He was there, in her mind—he could see himself there, could see himself now. She looked into his eyes and demanded nothing. She would take nothing from him. He felt the breath in his lungs, a chill that settled in the spongy pith that cradled a heart beating warm and defiant against the cold contusions of this body. He could peer through the space between his fingers, he could feel the hollows of his cheeks, the bones that lingered just beneath, out of sight—this integument he had made for himself, fragile, faltering. His mouth was dry. Memories flaked away like ice falling from the stones.

Beneath the thin fabric of his shirt she could count each of his starveling ribs—she saw his trembling fingers, nails black, blood-lined, bleeding, careless of himself, the awkward angles of his limbs as he crouched, shivering. All colour drained from his face, and he was as white as the snow in which he sat. He dug his hands into the snow again with a frantic jerk, up to his elbows. His back hunched, his shoulders trembled fitfully—the frantic desperation of a drowning man.

"Cole?” she asked again, her voice soft, taking careful steps on the ice-lined path.

"I—I—I," he stuttered. He looked up at her, his eyes pale coins in the moonlight, smears of dark purple beneath as though he had never slept in his life.

“They’ll die,” he said, his voice fluttering in the air. “Cold crying. Can you hear it? Don’t listen!”

He stared, those bright, wide, incomprehensible eyes that reflected the moonlight with the same sheen as the winter ice that covered over everything.

They were smeared with dirt, crying. He reached. One was in his hands. A shivering slash of pink, flesh stretched back over a mouth filled with sharp teeth that gnawed at the air; nothing but an insatiable hollow. He held it to his chest but it squirmed, bit, smeared with his icy blood. He felt all its little bones beneath its paper-thin flesh.

"Cole," she said, her voice a shiver in the chill air. "Please."

The wind rose, rushed, reached with long fingers to brush against her skin. The moon was covered over with clouds. The withered vines that clung to the walls shifted with a mournful rustle. The hairs at the back of her neck crisped; in the muffled light he looked at her with the shyness of a wild thing, the fearful longing of something set apart.

“There’s nothing you can do for it.”

He had felt the waxy turnip skins in his clenched hands, the crumbling bread as he tore it up, the rotting plums, slippery-sweet sickness from split skin. Touch turned to memory, wasting away to help another; now she offered him her hand, her warmth—her blood was close to the skin; she trembled.

“He was alone,” he whispered. He placed the dying kit back into the earth. “And I pushed through and held his hand.”

His voice stirred the air as he reached out with desperate fingers and felt for her. She was a bright point, a slip of light, and he—afraid to come near, for fear he would blot it out. He brushed his fingers against hers and nearly shied back from the shock; she grasped his hand in both of her own. He stood, the snow shifting under his sudden weight. She drew him to her. The moon, obscured, darkened everything; he could barely see in the lightless confusion of night. There was only her voice, and her hands—nothing left to say where he ended and she began except the press of heat and cold between their clasped palms.

The darkness stretched out so long in these cold months. It was late—later than she liked, and even Lille and Fabien had only departed for the dormitory an hour or two before she had emerged to find Cole in the snow. In the winter, with these high walls surrounded by mountains, the darkness pressed down so firmly. Skyhold lit candles and frayed their burning wicks; little points of light, wishes for warmth in the lonely night.

She led up him the stairs, one step at a time, mindful of the slicks of ice that shone across the stones. She could feel all the little bones of his fingers beneath his papery skin. It frightened her, her shoulders shaking, her breath hanging in the air—the rabbit writhed in her mind as she coaxed Cole up the steps, heart humming.

The door slipped shut behind them and she, still leading him by the hand, crossed the pitch-black room she knew sightlessly. His hand was clammy in hers, reflecting the warmth she gave it—she held it, careful of herself, afraid to let go.

Earlier that day she and Lille had boiled milk with Rivani spices and drops of rosewater and, simmering, curdling, it had been formed into sticky candies for upstairs. Now only the scent, a memory, lingered in the kitchen; musky, perfumed, sweet and sweaty—the intoxicating recollection of infancy, of a mother's breast. It clouded over even the warm smell of the rising dough that sat in pots near the empty hearth.

She turned in the dark, assured of him only by touch.

“Please don’t—don’t disappear,” she said, her voice a bare thread.

“I can't.” A sound that echoed on the stones. Diffuse in the darkness, Bri held him for a moment longer until his answer died away.

She released his hand—he was gone. Quickly she turned to the hearth and with trembling hands laid down a little nest of kindling from the box of firewood and scratched out a spark with the tinderbox that lay beside it.

The shiver of light dissolved into darkness. She tried again, spilling more of the little flares onto the stones, scattering, failing. Finally the oil-soaked cloth flared, and a little edge of flame lapped at it—she lifted it tenderly from the hearth and pressed it into the nest of kindling she had laid, blowing into it, bringing it to life with a lick of flame that curled up from the feathery wood.

She brought a candle to it and the wick flared to life with a tremulous breath; she sighed to find him still standing there, made visible by the sphere of warm light, the hungry little flame, that lit their necks and faces and illuminated their breath in the chill air..

The light reasserted them both. The light defined them; they were here—they were real. The night could be driven back.

So close she could see all the little imperfections of his skin that made him, now, seem more alive than she had ever seen him before. There were patches of shadow along his jawline, the faint fading of a bruise, small scars from a life in the world; in her mind he was like a statue that had only just come to life.

“Oh,” she said, holding up his hands; they were scratched all down his fingers, palms red, his nails crusted with cold earth. Her own hands were streaked with his blood from leading him there. “Let me—I can help.”

She went to the shelf by the door; the basin of water was stoppered with a thin crust of ice, the rag beside it frostbitten and cold. She took them down and placed them beside the kindled fireplace, then went back for the jar of elfroot paste they kept for kitchen scrapes. She sat beside him, wringing the rag before the lick of fire she had grown before cracking the basin’s ice with the heel of her palm.

“I don’t do it to myself,” Cole said. She looked to him, her lips still held tight on words she didn’t want to say. “I heard the rabbits. I heard their hunger. I heard their need. They’re—they’re going to die.”

She wet a corner of the cloth and washed the crumbled smears of dried blood from his hands.

“They were—born too early,” she said, wringing the cloth again. “It’s bad luck to be born in winter.”

“No,” Cole said. Carefully she dabbed at the balm with her fingertip and smeared it across his cuts. “That’s not it. Their mother died. They weren't ready. They were scared, starving—I couldn’t—”

His fingers closed over hers. His hands were rough, sinewy from curling around the hilts of sharper blades than the kitchen knife she kept. She looked up at him for a brief moment but her eyes dropped again when she saw his stare.

“I—“ Bri said, her throat grasping at the sound. How he dredged at the base of her mind. She looked at his hands again—his nailbeds were still blue-lined from the cold. “You’re so—” she started again, but fell silent. She lifted their clasped hands to her lips; her breath, warm, shared what little she had, what he could not give.

He watched her with an unnatural stillness. When his flesh held the warmth she gave it she let them go; he brought them to his chest as she sat before him, cheeks flushed, glancing at the whisper of flame beside her.

“Do you want something to eat?” she mumbled, her eyes still on his hands. “I can find something for you.”

Shakily she stood before he could respond, taking the candle with her. In the room just beyond the kitchen there were long tables set with pieces of leftover bread, drying to make breadcrumbs. They thickened soups, made crusts for meat, and served as plates for the servants’ meals. Bri picked over the remains and found a long, crumbling piece of crust to take to Cole.

“It’s stale,” she said when she returned, crouching beside him. “I’m sorry.”

“I—I—I,” he stuttered, but took the crust of bread. She watched him for a moment as he cradled the offered food like a gift too precious to handle. They were silent, no sound but the crackle from the hearth as the fire grew.

“I—I’ll find some butter. To soften it.”

She moved to rise again but he looked up at her with wide, fearful eyes and she paused, brow knitting, then moved to sit beside him again.

“Oh, I—All right.”

The fire was hungry; she fed it. The flames leapt a little higher, and the pair of them left long shadows that jumped and mingled in the shapeless night. She looked to him now—the stale bread still sat in his hands, uneaten, untasted.

“I’m sorry. ” she said, hopeless.

“There’s too much hurt. Everything starves.” Gently, as though he clutched at the dying rabbit again, he laid the bread on the stones at his feet. “Everything dies.”

She watched their shadows as they crossed, gathered, separated, then came together again with ease. She did not know how two people, closed as they were, could form a whole; she did not know how he thought, sat beside her on the stones, looking at the crust of bread as though it were just another curious object. She took up the kitchen cloth again, wringing it with hands used to endless kneading, to simple tasks performed without pause. She had, for so long, tried to empty herself of need. To open oneself is a wounding. She did not know what to say to him; when she had sat with Lille Bri had looked hopelessly up at the cloudless sky as her friend wept.

A memory rose up in her. When she was very young she had cried one sleepless night and her mother, to quiet her fears, snuck her up to the roof garden of the manor in Val Chevin. They’d stared up at the clear summer sky together and her mother had pointed out the shapes of stars, their names, their histories. Now Bri looked up and saw only the familiar rows of aromatics, hanging, drying above them, blooming from their beams. They were suspended in the cold air among the hanging copper pans that shone warmly in the light. She pointed to one—long, furls of dull red, paper-thin and bundled up with string. His eyes followed the trail of her arm.

“Spindleweed. They say it grows for the sorrowful,” she offered. He was peering up to where she pointed from beneath his hat. She continued; “You can make soup from the young shoots—it’s supposed to be good for you if you’re ill. It’s very bitter, though. I don’t think you would like it.”

She pointed to another bunch, their spiked leaves sharply defined in the shadows.

“Those are rashvine nettles. They’re peppery when ground up—make your tongue numb—the cooks put it in sauces. But it’s expensive—something the nobles like. They like strange things.”

Another plant beside it, frail with trailing, faded leaves. At this one she smiled—soft, faint.

“Prophet’s laurel. We put the dry leaves in wine for marinades. They say it’s blessed by Andraste—that it only grows where the Chant is sung, or that it sprung up where she walked, or that it was the first to wither when she died. Something like that.”

All cooks are herbalists at heart; she smiled softly to herself.

“I used to know which mushrooms were poisonous and which were good to eat but I’ve forgotten now. Nothing like that grows up here. Besides, only Orlesians like mushrooms in their cakes.”

Cole was silent beside her. The little fire at their backs crackled fitfully to keep alive. Carefully she took his hand again.

“I could find you something sweet,” she offered. She stood, pulling him to his feet, and raised the candle to guide them from the room.

It was winter—the larder held sour things: cabbage soaking in spiced vinegar, lemons in oil, all manner of root vegetables kept in cold brine. A root cellar held wooden boxes of potatoes covered with summer soil, parsnips, turnips, pale carrots that had barely seen the sun. In another store room below were pots of pork and fowl suspended in fat, beside hanging hams cured with spices, trotters tied with twine. But the bakers required more delicate things: fruit stirred into syrup, essences of flowers, sweet flavours brought from every corner of Thedas.

The room was wide, deep, windowless, cold. Arranged on the shelves before them were all kinds of bottles, jars, squat boxes and delicate glass vials. She lit the candles and pointed to each jar, naming them from memory: beside the crates of fruit from warmer climes there was a bottle of sugary sap tapped from trees that came from Ferelden, a Rivaini jaggery distilled from palms, and from the Anderfels a nectar teased from the rare flowers that bloomed from those hard, spiny plants that grew out of the sand, those ones whose petals only unfurled at night. Even from the depths of Orzammar they had a little earthenware jar of boiled sweet syrup, stolen from the maws of those carnivorous plants that had long ago learned to live without light. Orlesians found it too earthy—it was rarely used. By far the best were blocks of solid white cane sugar from Tevinter—cut and ground by slaves—which ensured that no power in Thedas could ever truly sever ties with the Imperium. It came in huge cones, drained of molasses, powdery white like freshly-fallen snow. It was ground into bite-sized pieces for stirring into tea or fine, wispy powders to dust cakes.

“The Inquisitor’s horse eats a pound of it every week,” Bri said.

“He likes it,” Cole said. Bri nodded.

“He should.”

Now she held up a clay pot, and when she lifted the lid a scent of earthy sweetness wafted up with the heady bite of booze.

“Dates from Tevinter. They’re preserved in sugar syrup. And those," she pointed to another stoppered jar, more bright rounds of fruit swimming in dark amber liquid, “apricots from Nevarra, in brandy. They’ve been there since the summer. They’re both for Wintersend.”

She went to another shelf and gave him a small, excited smile.

“And look,” she said, and unwrapped a cold, dark block to the candlelight; there were hard, grated grooves down one side. “We even have chocolate.”

Dark and bitter, full of night, they shaved pieces to scatter over the tops of cakes or melted large blocks for chocolate creams and custards to fill pastries.

“It's made far away,” he said. “Careful cracking on a heated stone. Enough pressure, enough warmth, and it changes into something rich.”

She nodded, covering it up again.

“Orlesians want it in everything,” she said. “I’ve heard the Empress has a kitchen just for making chocolate, and a _chocolatière_ who makes it all day. They say all her courtiers drink it every morning because she does.”

"The one beautiful thing that grows there. They're proud of it. The rest is death.”

Bri had heard about Seheron’s endless war; it was off to the north, far away, the only mention of it when the cocoa beans came. Quietly she moved to the little glass vials that sat on a lower shelf, delicate stoppers quivering as she approached. She plucked one up, opened it, and held it out to him.

“Here,” she said, “this is nicer.” He leaned forward and peered down the vial’s narrow neck.

“Warm walled gardens in Val Royeux, trailing sharp-thorned vines, plush petals on tightly budded cores,” he said. “It smells of summer.”

“Rosewater. We have others—violets, almonds, oranges, lavender, vanilla. Lille sneaks in here and puts some behind her ears sometimes. Fabien must know—she doesn’t hide it, but he hasn’t said anything.”

She carefully stoppered it again and placed it back on the shelf; the heavy scent lingered on her as she came back to his side.

“When I first came here we never got anything like this. It was just potatoes and onions and dried beef. Lots of fish, too, kept in salt. For a while the people here ate the same things the soldiers eat in the valley. All I made was brown bread for months.” She smiled to herself. “That’s almost all we made last month until the roads were finally cleared.”

Now she crossed to the boxes, some with lids laid loosely on them. Oranges, lemons, apples—even strawberries and cherries, summer fruits that stained everything red.

"Do you ever talk to them?" he asked, and pointed to a box; she followed his arm—there were oranges inside.

“No," she said. “But Lille hums, sometimes, when she works. Fabien told her to stop, he said it annoyed him. But she still does it. She once got the whole kitchen to sing a song when they made the evening meal. It was nice, but Fabien never joined in.”

She smiled at the memory; Cole looked to her, sad.

“It makes him go home. He doesn’t want to.”

“I don’t—”

He moved to the box and took one of the oranges. Bringing it back to her, he pressed it carefully into her hands. Out of instinct, she began to pare it of its tough rind. He watched her, the faint scent of citrus that misted from it as she worked, how easily she slid her fingers beneath its skin, gentle not to bruise the fruit beneath.

“We can make candies from the peel,” she said as she laid each strip of orange aside. “We can’t let anything go to waste in the winter.”

“It’s not winter where they come from.”

She glanced at him; he had moved to pick another one up from the box, turning it in his hand, inspecting its rough skin.

“These are from Montsimmard,” she said. “They have huge hothouses there—easier than bringing them all the way from Antiva or Rivain, like some of the other things.”

She pulled the fruit from its skin as his voice rushed like clear water.

“The elves who picked them used to sing when they worked. Soft songs for rough hands, pace for pulling fruit from burdened boughs.” He put the orange back among the rest. “A mother sang to her baby on her back as she trimmed the branches. A man carved a flute from the wood and played it for his children. The fruit—they remember the songs.”

She had stilled her fingers as she listened to him; the pungent peel was half-curled around her hand.

“You always tell pretty stories,” she said, finally, and dragged the rest of the rind away.

“I like your stories, too,” he said.

She smiled, and handed him a few crescent-shaped sections. Again he merely held them, running his fingertips across the white fleshy pulp that threaded across the skinned fruit like veins. She watched him as she ate her pieces, slight and sweet.

“There’s a lot to think about with food,” she said, holding the last piece in reverent fingers. “We need it but—it’s not just the flavor or the smell or how it looks. It’s memory. The strongest part of it is memory, I think.”

She turned the half-translucent section of the orange over in her hands, her fingertips sticky with juice.

“I’’ll remember the first time I had one,” she said, voice soft. “Or the first time I found a worm in one. Or how the housekeeper at Val Chevin would give me a fresh orange for Wintersend.”

Slowly she lifted it to her lips and bit; a bright, bitter scent wafted up to her. Warmth in the cold, the promise of summer. Pomanders of dried oranges studded with cloves hanging from door lintels. A memory of salt-and-pepper hair and a wide smile as the housekeeper bent to give her a holiday treat.

Cole was watching her curiously, crouched atop the crate; he sprung up, moving to a wide bowl on the shelf; he brought it down to her.

“Oh,” she said, as he held it out to her. More precious fruit—they sat on a cloth, cherries thawing for the delicate tongues of dignitaries and the nobility. Some still had flakes of ice on their skins, burning red in the light.

“He hit Lille last time,” he said. She dug up a handful of the cherries and let them fall back into the bowl one by one.

“It—It should be fine,” she said. “It should be all right. You matter—more than we do.”

“I—I—I,” he stuttered again.

“You’re important.” She smiled weakly. He peered into the bowl.

"They make people happy," he said. “They were flowers first. Pretty pink petals weeping from boughs bent with summer leaves. They changed.”

Nodding, she sat cross-legged on the cold floor, arranging her skirt and then placing the bowl in her lap. He joined her, sitting opposite. She plucked up a cherry with her flour-crusted fingers and reached for her knife; it wasn’t there, wrapped up in her apron in the kitchen where she had hung it.

“Oh,” she said, shaking her head. Cole produced a long, dark dagger—she hesitated for a moment before gripping its unfamiliar hilt. It was heavier than her kitchen knife, but with a short, quick twist of her fingers over the blade she pulled the pit from the cherry and held it out to him. He watched, his eyes on the dagger and the fruit that bled freely over her fingertips.

“Have one,” she said, and smiled weakly. He sat still, gangly elbows resting on his knees. He'd left his pieces of the orange on a shelf by the syrups, and the sharp slice of stale bread on the stones. She wouldn't ask again; with a gentle tremor, she placed it to his mouth. His eyes raised to hers for a few heartbeats as she pressed to him this sweet thing, this moment. He accepted it, and her fingertips brushed his feathered lips, dry, cracked, cold—she took them away. He licked at the corners of his mouth; she laughed—low, quiet, a hand pressed over the sound, shy of herself. The bright red juice still stained them.

“Do you like it?” she asked. He smiled.

“Yes. It’s sweeter now.”

She bent her head, eyes cast down to the bowl in her lap.

“Do you want anything else?”

“No,” he said.

The candle at her side drowned in its own wax, sputtering out with a gentle hiss. She turned to look at it, at the sudden absence of light which inched the kitchen back into darkness—when she looked back to him his eyes were on her. The last of the firelight shone off his skin; it had regained some colour, though the bright blue threads of his veins were still there, and the mottled colour that clouded beneath his eyes. He looked away, as if suddenly shy of her gaze—that same inscrutable look as when she had handed him the pastry that first chill morning they had spoken—restrained, reflective, reaching beyond for something just out of his grasp.

Her shoulders slumped, suddenly tired.

In the corner of her eye Cole moved again—she looked back and he was reaching towards her. She was quiet, still, as he picked out a cherry from the bowl in her lap. Then he reached for his own knife, and with the same movement she had made pitted the cherry and held it up—not to his lips, but to hers.

“I shouldn’t,” she whispered, and shied back from his offering. “They’re not for me.”

“You’re important.”

Shining wetly, bright red, the juice staining his skin, he brought it to her mouth and she accepted it. A profusion of sugar, the fruit’s dark flavour, and the shared heat of his fingertips as they brushed her lips. She swallowed heavily under his eyes. His hand moved back to lay limply in his lap. The candle flickered. Everything soft, everything cold—but just beneath, the thrum of her heart, the breath that moved through her, these little rhythms, the ebb and flow of warmth. She felt it, faintly, as they sat separate as two trees, bereft of their leaves, brushing together by the wind.

“Are you—do you—“ she began, though her voice fell to a whisper.

“He said 'Thank you’,” he answered, his eyes cast down, his voice so low she could barely hear the words. She leaned close, to better hear him—he looked up, suddenly, bright and heavy.

“Thank you.”

The rabbits would die, swallowed up by the earth and snow. Their cries were beyond this warm circle of light she had made for him. The taste of cherries echoed on her tongue; Lille’s fingers, crisscrossed with red marks from the fall of a switch, clouded over with the feel of Cole’s lips beneath her fingers, his eyes as she offered him the fruit, his words as he let her have the same moment she has given him. That shared space where they wordlessly brushed the edge of the same sensation.

Outside, the Chantry bells tolled the morning hour. Bri straightened, eyes wide, then jumped to her feet; Cole caught the bowl of cherries before they fell into the creases between the stones.

"It's morning!” She shook the fog from her head. Rushing, she pushed past the heavy doors into the lightless hall, then back to the kitchen where the only light was the scratchings in the hearth and the slip of hazy morning dawn under the door to the courtyard. Moving to it, she opened it a scant crack; rising from the horizon was a rosy clot of clouds churning through the mountain peaks.

"I have to light the ovens," she whispered, frantic. Her voice shivered; a draught slipped through the door, carried on the first sunlight, and chilled her. She shut the door on the morning and turned; Cole had not followed her. She went back to the larder—he was gone. Just the skin of the orange, the bowl of cherries, and the crumbled, uneaten piece of bread. She blew out the candles and left.

Wringing her hands she went back to the kitchen, to the fire she had kindled for him; it had fluttered to cinders. Kneeling before the hearth she began the long, aching process of bringing it back to life.

Soon, too soon, the door opened behind her as she knelt before one of the ovens, stoking its glowing charcoal.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly between the breathless bellows of her lungs. “I’m almost done, I just—”

“It’s me!” Lille said, and laughed—that bright, crackling sound. “I’m guessing Fabien is late?”

“No, he’s not here,” Bri said, standing and wiping her soot-streaked hands on her skirts, straightening her hair, sighing. Lille was looking at her from her place by the hanging smocks.

“You forgot this,” Lille said, and winked; she tossed over a bundled apron. Catching it haphazardly, Bri nodded and put it on, tying it tight behind her back. She stood for a long moment, silent and still, eyes unfocused. The scent of milk had faded to nothing.

“Bri?” Lille’s voice was a sharp crack. “Let’s start, yeah?”

She held open the door to the pantries. Bri watched her, her shoulders tense and shaking, her fingers wound into the folds of her apron. Lille smiled with one corner of her mouth, watching her curiously before she turned slipped into the hall.

A sigh, tight and taut as twine, choked at Bri’s throat—for the sight and touch in the night that had already slipped into the smoke of memory.  Weary, heavy, she bent and scooped up the heavy pots of dough that sat by the hearth, ready for their hands.

The day wore on. Fabien arrived late, after the first few loaves came from the ovens. The morning, then the afternoon meal passed, and in the lull before supper was served Bri had mixed the delicate batter and laid dollops on the sheet to bake. Watching wide-eyed, she had held her breath for each spoonful to still her shaking fingers.

“No, no,” Bri whispered. “No, please, no.”

Perfect round batter broke and blistered in the heat; when she dragged it from the oven’s depths they fell apart at the slightest touch, too fragile to even peel from the tray.

“You mixed them too much,” Fabien said at her side, his voice high to rise above the kitchen din. “Throw them out.”

“They’re—” she began; Fabien, hands wrapped in the skirt of his apron, snatched the tray from her grasp; the cracked pieces scattered.

“They’re _ruined_. I won’t let them be served.” He upended the tray in the bucket with the other kitchen leavings; the little gnarled puffs of almond pastry fell among the refuse. Bri watched, her lips pressed to a thin line.

“Fabien!” Lille snapped, voice low. Fabien looked to her and for a moment his expression slipped; it returned just as quickly.

“Now take them to the horses,” he said, turning back to Bri, jabbing a finger at the bucket.

“Fabien!” Lille said again, and slapped the ball of dough she was kneading onto the countertop. “Why do you have to _do_ that?”

“Have to do what?” His voice cracked hard against the stones—but he faltered, stepping back, blinking rapidly under Lille’s unwavering eyes.

“Make sure everyone is just as miserable as you.”

Every ear in the kitchen perked at the words; on the table two kitchenhands were prying open a wheel of salty Nevarran cheese, pulling back the knives they had stuck into a slit in the rind. Now they stopped, handles jutting from the round as they turned to look. Fabien's fingers trembled as he brought a hand to the collar of his shirt.

"Everything you two do reflects on _me_ ," he said, each word punctuated, punched, like he twisted a knot of unyielding dough. "Your incompetence becomes _my_ problem. The First Day feast is in less than a week and if Briony can’t make the _macarons_ properly, then I—”

“You don’t have to—” Lille stopped when, without a sound, Bri crossed to the bucket of scraps and picked it up with both hands, straightening her back, holding her breath.

He turned his head sharply, dragging away from Lille’s eyes.

“Take them to the horses _now_ , Briony."

Lille called out her name as Bri walked silently by, slipping through the open door to the courtyard. It slammed behind her with a juddering reverberation,  shutting her out from all the voices of the kitchen.

She descended the steps with the scraps. It had snowed sometime that night, and the spot near the wall where she had drawn Cole up from the snow was blanketed over with fresh frost. Now even in her memory the moment was obscured, only pinpricks of cold as he clasped her hand in his, the taste of cherries. The rabbits were dead.

She brought the bucket to the stables, the macarons at the bottom with apple peels and potato skins. They shone like smashed shells, glittering in their broken splendour. The horses chewed them up to nothing with their great stained teeth, dumb, impassive, consuming the ruined treats with the same determination with which they ate everything.

She left the empty bucket by the stall doors and walked back to the courtyard; she lingered at the base of the steps to the kitchen, looking up at the shut door. In the barn the ostlers were re-shoeing a horse; knotted to the posts with heavy rope, it pulled at its harness, wide-eyed and whinnying as a man drove long nails through its hooves. Long, shining clangs of the hammer rang out, the iron shoes hissing as they cooled in a trough of icy water, the brazier crackling with heavy heat. The horse screamed again.

Quickly Bri turned, and instead climbed the steps to the battlements. The daylight diffused through the clouds and cast its shadowless light across the stones—a hazy, indistinct gleam washed over everything, bright winter sunlight that stung the eyes. The wind scoured the faces of the patrolling guards. Gritting her teeth, Bri dug her nails into her palms, crossing her arms over her chest as she hurried down the length of the ramparts.

She escaped the harsh light and noise by slipping into one of the towers—one of the last to be repaired when the Inquisition came to Skyhold, it held only ruined furniture and haphazardly-stacked wooden crates, makeshift storage for the tavern next door. Wringing her red, cold-seared hands, she crouched by a wall and sighed with a long, heavy breath. She had not stopped moving—the pastries, then the bread, then every little task she did daily—all memory of quiet and calm pushed from her mind, all the difficulties pushed and stretched and kneaded as she worked. And when she remained, when the kitchen grew quiet and dark, she still worked—not knowing anything else, not knowing herself. Night broke into dawn and the light made her wince.

The macarons had cracked and blistered in the oven. Mixed badly, or the oven too hot, or any of the thousand things that posed questions she couldn’t answer; Fabien had thrown them away as though they were eggshells or apple skins, not fit for anyone but animals to eat. If not this, then nothing. They had cracked and blistered and were thrown away. All she was, all she knew—cracked and blistered. She placed her head in her hands, bowed, bent. Her fingers smelled like burnt almonds.

“He wants to be another necessary hazard, like knives or fire, things that won’t let you mishandle them for long.”

It was Cole—perched on a nearby crate, crouched beneath that heavy hat like he always was. She stood quickly, smoothing her apron, shaking away the dense cloud that had settled in her mind.

“His words hurt worse than wounds—he knows they do. He doesn’t have to hit.”

She listened as he spoke; he was picking at his gloves again, head tilted down so the brim of his hat obscured his face—the way she had used to see him, before she had drawn him out of the snow.

“They weren’t right,” she said, and shook her head, “it was my fault. I should have known—I stirred the batter too many times, or the oven was too hot, something like that, I—” She took a long, shaking breath.

“I shouldn’t have tried. Fabien makes them perfect, every time.”

“He made them badly, once,” Cole said.

“Well,” she said with a bitter laugh, “he doesn’t act like it.”

“Yes he does.”

His voice came up in a question but she knew it wasn’t one; he raised his eyes at this, looking to her in the dim light that filtered through the slit of a window in the wall.

“You think you aren’t as good because he worked in Val Royeaux before he came here. But that’s not true.”

“He didn’t work in Val Royeaux?”

“No—I mean—your bread is better,” he said, shifting from one leg to the other. “Yours are better because you care that they’re good for other people. Yours are the ones that are on the trays for the guests. Donatien makes sure.”

She wiped her hands on her flour-smeared smock and watched him for a long moment.

“How do you know?”

“I listen,” he said.

She sighed; her eyes dropped to the floor.

“It would be nice if that were true,” she said wistfully. They fell into silence again.

She felt his hand slip over hers—warmer than her own this time. He had drawn closer in that silent way he always used to leave her.

“Here,” he said, and gently lead her to the side-door; it opened to the top landing of the tavern, its slanted roof closing in so there was barely room to stand. Voices drifted up from the floors below but this one was empty, the corners stacked with more crates and chests. He led her to the far corner, where the light was lowest, where only a single sconce flickered in a low flame.

Her eyes shifted across the landing; it was a magpie’s nest. A drift of chicken feathers gathering between the creases of the floorboards, a cluster of knives sticking savagely from the wooden beam, a faint glitter of tarnished jewellery—lost things.

“They’re not lost,” he said. She had been staring at two jars she recognised from the kitchen, empty of their contents. He shook his head. “I find them. Sometimes I bring them back—sometimes they need to be taken away.”

“Do you live here?” she asked.

“I stay here,” he said. “I live everywhere.”

She nodded absently, passing a hand over her brow where her rough-chopped fringe of hair stuck to her skin in a cold sweat. She looked to the floorboards; beneath their feet there spilled sheets of paper with careful scratches and blotches of ink. She looked back to find him leaning over the railing, watching the sparse scattering of people move on the floors below.

“I like it here,” he said. “I can still listen. The bard plays less than half the songs she knows—I wish she’d play the one she loves.”

He hummed a handful of notes, a gentle lilt of sound, before looking back to her.

“It’s like that, but—better.”

She moved to stand beside him, her hands resting lightly on the railing. Her eyes still stung, her neck still pricked with cold—she looked to him, standing there, head bent, shifting his weight from one foot to the other in that nervous agitation.

“You disappeared,” she said. “When the Chantry bell rang. I thought—I don’t know. Why?”

“You didn’t need me anymore,” he said. “If I stayed—then you may not have wanted me there.”

“Oh, no, I—” she breathed the words in a heavy sigh. “I didn’t mean—”

“Thank you,” he said, and looked up to the ceiling where the sconce’s smoke curled and dissipated. “For helping me. It should be the other way around.”

She shook her head in a shuddering jerk.

“I had to,” she said. “You—”

She sighed, words twisting in her chest. Her body ached with them. Stepping away from the railing she sat herself beside a stack of crates,  drawing her knees to her chest. Only for a moment, she knew, then she’d return to where she belonged. But now she sat among Cole’s odd collection,  making the stray feathers swirl beside her with a brush of her fingers.

"I was thinking about what you said. About memory.”

She looked up; he came to sit with her.

“Mother cooking, keeping close, a knife to brandish and banish— _get out of here, leave him alone_. I stole scraps from the table, kind crumbs of comfort. Found safety in—the kitchen cupboard.”

His eyes reflected the firelight, bright, impassive.

“I—” she began, almost tripping over the word. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “It’s worse to forget. It helps. I need to remember these parts of me. The parts that need.”

She remembered how he had looked to her she’d nervously offered to find him butter to soften the bread he wouldn’t eat; one need consuming another, twining together with the scent of sweet milk. Now she reached and gently placed her hand over his once more; his fingers were slack for a long moment—then soft, quiet, they clasped her own.

“I—I—I,” he stuttered. “I wanted to be the least dangerous thing to myself. I thought if I didn’t eat then I wouldn’t want. I hid, I forgot, I made it so I wouldn't. It's different now, but—sometimes I feel like a shadow. A step behind—following my body as it moves. Sometimes I feel trapped inside, too heavy, can't release, can't relax. Closed in a cupboard in my own mind. It’s—hard to explain in words. There are so many feelings that words don’t touch.”

Her eyes slid from him; just the press of their palms remained.

"The kitchen reminds you of your mother, too. But in a different way."

"She worked in a manor house in Val Chevin. A baker."

“And then she went away.”

“She died.”

“I’m sorry.”

He had cradled the crust of bread in his palms, curiously inspected the knotted confection of almonds and fruit she had shared with him, had traced his fingertips over the star-shaped pastry she had made that first morning when he came to her with that guilty jar of honey. The cherry had passed his lips only at her urging—and he had shared that with her with a quiet, careful touch.

“I had trouble eating too, once,” she said quietly. “When my mother died and I was alone. I thought—I thought that if there were less of me, there would be less of me to hurt.”

She took a long, baleful breath.

“I think we hurt ourselves the most, in the end.”

“Yes,” Cole said. “I learned that, too.”

The borders of her body itched with the void inside her. He looked, and she let him look—stretched so thin, there were just fits and flashes from the dredged depths of her memory, just behind her eyes.

“You said you were happy when you made the tarts, but it wasn’t true.”

She looked at him now. The flames lapped at the air but here the light was deeper, warmer, clouded with the heavy dark of the attic floor. Between the floorboards there were little cracks of light, laughter, low music that drifted up to them from the people below. Here, above, they listened together. Here,  the frantic flutter of the day could quiet.

“No, maybe not. I can’t—I can’t talk about this with Lille. Not really."

“Yes. You think of her like frosting," he said. “Like a curl of cream on a cake. Sweet, light, comforting, but also—something pretty for appearances."

Another bitter laugh as she drew her hand from his and rubbed at her eye with the heel of her palm.

"Is it that—Maker, I hope she doesn't know that. She's the only friend I have."

“Envy but empty—light lies listing with laughter but there's blood in the yolk when you crack it for custard. Bri,” he said her name with the same quick tone that she nearly jumped. “Is having friends supposed to hurt?"

She opened her mouth to speak but couldn't—closed her eyes tight to the sound. She dug in her mind, hard as iron, covered over; she shook the  crowding thoughts from her like flakes of ice.

“I’m sorry—” he said, suddenly distraught again; she pushed dishevelled strands of hair behind her ear.

“I’m trying to understand,” he said. “I still don’t know if I do. Everything can seem so separate, even when I know they’re not.”

Their shadows mingled in the dim light of the attic hold. He reached out and, carefully as though afraid of what he would feel, he brushed his fingertips along her flushed cheek. She gave a short breath—her neck came up in gooseflesh. He answered in a whispered sorry as she drew away.

“You’re the only one who talks to me. I—I—I,” He stuttered out the word. “Sometimes I don’t know what’s real. I have to remember.”

The floor was hard and painful beneath her; she shifted where she sat. Her apron, smeared with flour, cracked and flaked as she moved. She turned to him; he looked at her with red-lined eyes, as sunken and tired as her own.

“I hope I help. I hope you can help.”

She had been pressed of all her words; she only nodded. What still remained of the day stretched out before her, bright and sharp, her heart like the fitful, shuttering beat of a hammer against a nail.

“I have to go,” she said. “They’re waiting for me.”

“Yes.”

She rose, her spine uncurling painfully. Cole remained, fidgeting among the ragged things he kept and cared for, things found and forgotten. Bri peered for a moment over the edge of the railing, at the lives of other people. She turned, again, to Cole.

"I'll—bring cherries next time," she said. "If you'll eat them with me."

A soft smile, a breath of laughter.

"Yes."

 


	6. Chapter 6

Torches had been lit in the lower courtyard, the snow cleared and the ice cracked to make way for dancing. Red-fingered musicians tuned their instruments by the firelight, plucking sounds that shivered in the chill air. The horses in the stables nickered, unused to such light and activity on a winter's night. 

It was First Day’s Eve, the birth of the year.

The kitchen had turned outside; one of the cooks made little fried cakes in a pot of oil over an open fire, which lovers shared between them or children scurried between legs to snatch from the trays. A kitchenhand had sunk buckets of sweet cream into the snow and were churning them into crude Orlesian _glacées_ , while still others, impatient, merely piled snow onto tables and poured hot syrup over the drifts, where it thickened into sticky strings that delighted onlookers scooped up into their mouths. 

The best was burning brightly in the centre of the courtyard; there was a great scattering of hot coals along the flagstones, banishing the cold, and heaped atop were large, skinned branches of wood that coiled and snapped with smoke. Above, splayed on cross-shaped stakes that leaned to take the heat were the crackling carcasses of whole sheep. Fat hissed in the pyres as they cooked, their limbs spread out, the smoke catching over their split ribs as the hungry celebrants watched. A meal to mark the new year, a feast to bury the old.

A shrine to Andraste had been assembled from Chantry candles and a wooden effigy; before this some had laid twists of dough or a few glittering coins, to assure the year ahead was Maker-blessed. Up on the ramparts a few elves, Dalish tattoos streaked across their faces in black coils, lay small, bitter cakes for the keep's ravens. Offerings to Falon'Din and Dirthamen for the year ahead; they'd mixed honey, flour, and ash from a campfire to feed to their god's heralds. They crumbled the hard, black little cakes and spread them on the stones for the birds to peck at and give their blessing; _keep our secrets, guide our dead, bring us back to the place where we began_.

A mage crackled bursts of blue and yellow light on his fingertips to awed onlookers until a sharp word made him stop.

Below, in the valley, the camps teemed; clustered points of light, bonfires, shouts that carried up the mountain. But here, halfway between the soldiers’ tents and the hall where the Inquisition entertained its guests, the servants made their own festivities to welcome the year to come.

The kitchen had scrambled to provide for them all: wine mulling on the stovetop; the heavy scent of cloves and oranges; garlands of dried flowers and winter berries; porkfat burning in the fireplace; crushed and candied fruits; roasted nuts cracked open in the fires; milk boiled to syrups—and everything dusted with a fine layer of sugar that made Lille sneeze. The dregs of the kitchen’s flurry of activity lay around them. Bri stood by the last lit stovetop, stirring the wine in the pot, watching as clouds of steam curled up from its whorling centre. It simmered sweetly, the orange skins and sticks of cinnamon roiling among the bruised red.

“I can do this on my own if you want to go down,” Bri offered. The hearth had been put out already, the fire shifted to the pits in the courtyard below. Only a passing kitchenhand would move through to fetch a rag or a sharper knife, or pass the door to the cellar to fetch more wine or another tray of nougat.

“Nah,” Lille said, and crossed the room to where the sacks of flour were packed into the corner. She wore a silver dress, well-worn, the one passed between all the women in their dormitory and claimed for special occasions. Its hem flashed when she moved, the rest covered over by her smock. Bri still wore the same rough servant's dress, patterned only with the usual streaks of flour. 

Lille winked as she sat heavily. “Besides, then we get the first of the wine.”

“It’s not ready,” Bri said. Lille shrugged, and leaned back. Sighing, her shoulders sank into the soft canvas. Bri watched from the corner of one eye, as though she peered into a keyhole into some scene she wasn’t meant to see; Lille was looking at her hands, cleaning the flour from under her fingernails as she spoke.

“Remember last year—they had that acting troupe from the Anderfels put on a play for us? Maker, it was so _boring_.”

“What do we have this year?”

“Elves playing Antivan music. So much better! I’ve been itching to dance for months now. All that music every other week in the hall and we get boring theatre once a year.”

“The play wasn’t so bad,” Bri said. She’d sat at the back on the hard Chantry pews brought to the cellar for the performance. Actors dressed in masks and armour had moved across the makeshift stage, preaching with their thick accents as the main character made his two hours’ worth of moral mistakes. By the end a woman with a blonde wig and a crooked nose—the most beautiful actor among the group—had come onstage as Andraste and chided them all directly. _I embrace all who remember the Chant_. All Bri could remember was the woman’s nose.

“Are you kidding?” Lille said, and laughed. “I know her Worship had just saved the world and all, but I didn't need people dressed up as spirits of Chastity and Hard Work telling me to be good while Sloth and Envy wiggled their hips. I’d peeled a thousand potatoes that day.”

Lille had been a scullery maid just a year ago but now she dandled a leg across her knee and, grinning, licked a stray spray of powdered sugar from the back of her hand.

“Besides,” she said, “we’re in the business of _pleasure_ down here, aren’t we? I reckon we get as much sugar here as Halamshiral.”

“Oh, not nearly,” Bri said. “I heard Donatien speaking with Lady Montilyet a few months ago about expanding the kitchens. Maybe then.”

“And will they put softer beds in the servants’ dormitories?” Lille asked, and laughed. “All velvet and goose feathers.”

She lolled back, her black hair streaming behind her head as she took a pose of idleness, her hand laid delicately at her round cheek. She shivered with a held-back laugh.

“Unlikely.”

Lille giggled—bubbling, delicious, like a whirl of wine. She jumped to her feet and came to Bri’s side.

“Here, here. Let me,” Lille said, and took the stirring spoon from her hands.

Bri stepped back, wringing her fingers in her apron; she watched as Lille briskly dipped a ladle into it and poured out a cup.

“It’s not ready,” Bri protested as Lille pressed it into her hands.

“Who cares?” she countered, and poured another. She raised her cup, grinning, and after a moment’s hesitation Bri smiled too and raised her own.

“To softer beds and bigger kitchens,” Lille said. “May this year be better than the last!”

“Maker forbid it’s worse,” Bri answered. She put down her cup as Lille took an indelicate gulp from her own; she breathed steam, the wine too hot.

“Oh, Bri,” she said, tutting her tongue as she picked up Bri’s cup and poured it into her own. “You know people who don’t drink are always _hiding_ something.”

Bri's brow furrowed, but turned to stir the wine again. The spices bubbled up, stained red. Lille mimicked her, giggling, and sipped slowly, steam curling around her cheeks—which had reddened already.

"Do you know where Fabien went?" Lille asked.

"He's in the hall," Bri said, shaken from her thoughts. Lille sneered, an exaggerated curl of her lip.

"Probably with Donatien, making sure everyone knows he baked the tarts.” She looked down at her cup, and took another sip. “I’m always surprised everything he makes isn't as _bitter_ as he is."

“Someone from the the guild of _pâtissiers_ in Val Royeaux is here, I think.” She looked to Lille for a moment before turning back. 

“Fabien—well.” She thought of all the _macarons_ in the hall above—how he had watched from his table as she made them, his sharp green eyes appraising. “He _does_ know what he’s doing.”

Lille gave a derisive laugh.

“He won’t let anyone think any different.”

Bri shrugged. Since preparations had began Lille and Bri had kneaded the day’s dough while Fabien had sculpted and decorated cakes for display. Lille beating endless eggs and butter, Bri baking trays of sponge and cutting them into shapes—but Fabien placed each on a turning tray and ornamented them with chocolate glazes, candied fruit and nuts, all kinds of brightly-dyed frostings. Lille, her arms aching, rolled her eyes as the elf dabbed artists’ brushes into dishes of coloured sugar as though they were paints, or placed tiny, edible flowers around a pastry with a pair of tweezers. They’d been brought upstairs before the kitchen staff could see the finished display.

“It’s pretentious,” Lille had said.

“It’s _Orlesian_ ,” Bri had answered, and Lille had only sneered again.

Now Bri watched as Lille set down her wine long enough to pull her smock over her head and hang it with the rest. She smoothed the folds of her dress with greater care than with anything she’d made that day. Laughing, she twirled—the skirt flared out, the silver stitches flashing brightly in the scant candlelight.

“I got this off Linna by promising her ten _macarons_ from upstairs.”

Linna was an apprentice gardener; Bri had seen her snip the pale white flowers from a new plant in the Chantry garden last spring—to help it grow taller, she’d said, to keep it focused on just one thing. They rarely spoke.

“ _Ten_? But I only—”

“Oh, no one eats _all_ of them. There should be some left, right? I’ll just pick them up when the party’s over.”

“All that’ll be left will be those anise and deep mushroom ones no one likes.”

“She didn’t say which _flavor_.” She spread the wide skirts between her hands, smiling to herself. “Besides, it looks best on me, I think. Elves look so _bony_ in it.”

Bri was quiet. Lille twisted at the hips again, watching as the dress coiled around her legs before fanning out once more. Almost all of them traded favors for this one pretty thing; sweets, soap, washing, work—anything to wear it for these evenings off. There was a puckered seam up one side where someone had shoddily fixed a tear, and a dull patch along the shoulder where someone else had scrubbed away a stain, most likely spilled wine. Still, it was the prettiest thing among Skyhold’s servants—Bri couldn’t remember who actually owned it. Some of the maids were too tall or short for it and some stretched the seams, but it fit Lille well.

“Me and Lowri are going to find Cerys down in the valley—that’s where the real party is. Catch some pretty soldiers before they get too drunk. Abelard will be with us too, I think.”

“Abelard? Isn't he the one who—” Bri began, her brow furrowed, but she stoppered the trickle of gossip before she said any more. Lille laughed.

“It's all true. He’s _great_ fun. Last year he drank two bottles of that watered-down wine we get _and_ a jug of pickling vinegar before the dancing even started. And when it did he went right into the middle of the dance and just let the music take him. Or the vinegar, who knows. Anyway, it'll be great fun."

Bri thought she might leave but she just took her wine and laid back again on the sacks of flour, and sighed a long, listing breath. She combed her fingers through her hair, thick and dark. How easily she could relax, catching every moment between shifts like a cat unwinding in the summer heat. Bri stirred the wine, her fingers tight around the ladle.

Two servants passed through from the pantry, each carrying four dark bottles of wine; they stopped and glanced to Bri, unsure, as they passed through the kitchen.

"Heyup," Lille called, sitting up—they smiled at her and spoke swiftly, excitedly. She knew their names. Bri looked away, and listened to the dull sounds of the spices clattering against the pot.

"—got some Chantry wine, it's much better—"

"—a stash of dried elfroot—

“—they’re already in the valley with—“

“In a minute,” Lille said. The pair left, returning upstairs to the waiting guests. Lille watched, her bright eyes catching all the light left in the room.

“Ah, the music’s started,” she said wistfully, leaning back in her makeshift seat. Amid all this the sound of strings and drums drifted up to them from beneath the door in bright flashes.

"Really," Bri said, "you can go down now if you like. I won't mind."

"Soon," she said, leaning back and clutching her drink to her chest. "Or I'll have no rest between work and play." 

Lille sighed again, deeply—content. She looked, sitting tall in her dress that flashed like a knife, the white steam curling around her cheeks and long, dark hair, like a seer divining secrets in her wine. Bri wondered if she could tell her future, if she came and sat at Lille’s feet and laid a cheek on her knee. Bri trying to know—trying to be like one of those curious spirits that pressed into Lille's head and knew her—but Bri only saw Lille like a curl of cream on a cake—no, no, that’s all Bri saw, separate as they were. 

Worried that Lille could read all her thoughts, more worried that she couldn’t—Bri did not know how to peel back the layers of a person, least of all herself.

“All right. I’ll go down now, I think,” Lille said into the silence. She stood, stretching, putting down her cup. “Please do come, Bri.”

“I might,” she said. “Later.”

Lille came to her side, smoothing down the creases of her borrowed dress again.

“Do, please do.” She leaned forward and grazed Bri’s cheeks with her own, light and careful, that same Orlesian masked distance. The scent of vanilla carried along with her—more borrowed perfumes from the pantry. 

“We’ll dance.”

Bri laughed, a soft breath, and nodded. Beyond the door the music trilled; Lille smiled, and took Bri by the hand. Before she could protest Lille's arm snaked around her waist and dragged her close, twirling, laughing. Bri clung to her neck, held her breath, trying not to trip as she was spun about the room. They pulled apart, laughing, but as they let go of one another Bri tripped and caught herself against the wall but Lille's hip hit the corner of the table; a small bowl of salt tipped its contents out.

"Ah, spilled the salt!" Lille said, and laughed, rubbing where she had hit the table. "Dead by dawn." 

She drew her finger across the spilled salt, raised her fingertip to her lips, and licked—then laughed, loudly, uproariously, nearly doubling over as she reached out and gripped Bri’s hand with an almost unbearable tightness.

“What—what’s going on?” Bri asked, still breathless from their twirling. Lille smiled again, mischievous.

“It’s sugar. That elf!”

Bri laughed, and swept the sugar into the palm of her hand to carefully pour back into its little dish. Lille watched, then took her hand again when she had finished. She gave it a soft squeeze. A few stray grains ground between their pressed palms.

"I'll see you later, then," she said, with a tight-lipped smile. Bri nodded, looking away, and slipped from her touch.

Suddenly she felt Lille's hands on her shoulders and was turned to face her quickly, playfully, staring wide-eyed to her friend who watched with that mischievous smile that lit all the curves of her face. Now Lille leaned to her and laid her lips on her cheek—heavy, giggling wetly, a hot breath against her skin, the hard press of her nose as she held her with the firm press of her fingers into Bri’s flesh. After a moment her grip slackened; Bri laughed nervously as she stepped away, a hand to her cheek.

"Are—You're drunk already?" she said, and pulled the corners of her mouth into a smile. Lille shrugged, cheeks flushed.

"You'll come out one day," Lille said. "I know you will.”

Bri only nodded, her shoulders slumping as she turned back to the wine and stirred it again—the desiccated skins of oranges bobbed uneasily within.

"Lille!" 

Lowri was at the door to the courtyard, her red hair knotted back behind her pointed ears, her usual smock replaced by a dress made from scraps of bright blue upholstery fabric. Lille looked up, her lips parting into the brightest smile.

“Are you coming?” Lowri asked. Lille nodded. 

“We can take the wine down with us,” she said, pointing to the vat. Bri gave the elf a small smile; Lowri only nodded to her before turning back to Lille.

“The bonfires in the valley are already lit, I think they’re having rope-burning contests.”

“Oh, can’t wait,” Lille said. “Did you find Abelard? Has he got anything in him yet?” Lille asked. Lowri laughed like a little bird—shrill, demanding.

“He in the courtyard. He _says_ he’s waiting for the mulled wine but I’m sure he’s snuck some of that Antivan brandy from upstairs.”

“He’s hit the ground running, Maker bless him,” Lille said. “Let’s go get him before he tries to dance alone.”

Bri stepped aside as the pair of them came for the wine, winding rags around their hands. They moved to either side of the pot.

“Ready?” Lille said, her fingers tight around the handle. “One, two—“

Together they lifted it between them; the wine sloshed against the side once, unsteadily, as they took a few tentative steps towards the open door. Lille’s silver dress swirled around her ankles as they walked unsteadily, Lowri’s narrow shoulders shaking with the weight.

"Maker!" Lille said, laughing. "You'd think it'd be lighter with all the wine I drank."

"Oh, you mare!" Lowri said. "I knew you were in here for a reason."

Moving back to the empty stovetop, Bri didn't watch as Lille left bearing her burden of wine—she only heard the door as it irrevocably shut behind her, and Lowri’s shrill laughter as Lille told her a joke.

Bri was alone, shut tight in the kitchen again. Earlier she'd watched kitchenhands tie each half-frozen, headless sheeps' carcasses to the crosses by their ankles, while the ostlers made a pile of sweet-smelling branches of applewood to throw on the coals. Donatien had busied himself with the hall's grand displays but the cook, a Ferelden woman, had overseen these crucified sheep and the bubbling vats of oil spitting sweet dough. Rougher cooking from her homeland—no place for _millefeuille_ or _choux_.

The stones seemed to thrum with the music outside—the smoked mutton would have finished by now, the flesh scraped from their bones.

Bri took up a shapeless ball of marzipan from the table and kneaded it between her fingers, moving to sit on the sacks of flour where Lille had lolled.

First she made a flower; pinching out a long strip of the stuff, she coiled it on itself to form a tightly-budded rose. Rolling it back into a ball, she stretched out its wings and beak and made a winter robin. Then the wings became the long, slender ears of a rabbit—as she formed its delicate legs between her fingertips she was reminded of the kits Cole couldn't save—a cherry to her lips—Lille's kiss before she turned away—a sad smile, a lingering press of the palms.

Her wrists ached. She crushed the ball of marzipan in her palm and looked up; there was a soundless swinging of the door hinges.

"Cole." 

He was there, hesitating on the threshold between the hall and the kitchen. She had not seen him since they had sat together in the attic of the tavern, weeks ago now. Not since her work had increased in the evenings counting down to this one.

"She wanted you to go with her,” he said. “She wanted to see what would happen. I thought you would. You almost wanted to, but then she turned away.”

Bri blushed that he had seen Lille's kiss; she put a hand to her cheek, as if to hide the memory of it from his eyes.

"She's with her friends," Bri said; she shrugged. The lingering scent of wine was heady in the room, and the memory of dizzy twirling mingled with it.

“You—want, and don’t want—to be there,” he said. "It kneads into a knot. Not sweet, not bitter. Just sad.”

She dropped the flat mound of marzipan on the countertop, misshapen, too soft from the warmth of her palms. 

"You don't have to be here with me, either," she said. "You could be in the hall."

"No, I—I—" he said, stepping into the kitchen. He shook his head. "The ones who would want me there have all gone away. The ones who stayed don't like my— _lurking_."

"Oh," she said, her voice smoothed of its edge. She looked, but couldn’t see his eyes.

“I’m learning,” he said. “Like Lille chastised for cherries meant for lips made for lying. Different dances to the same music—I hear the hurts laid under layers. I—I—I didn't know how to help. I didn’t understand it." He rubbed at one eye, his gaze shifting beneath his yellow lashes. "I hear less but—see better. So much pain to keep each step separate on a set of stairs. I don’t know if I like that part.”

She didn’t want him to leave—not really. Despite his words, he smiled softly beneath the brim of his hat.

"I told you," she said, looking away. "I'm not important."

"But Briony, you _are_."

They met here, in this space between above and below; she did not know what to say to him. The hall was alight with fire and fine music while in the courtyard the servants danced, joyous, pliant—

“You think everyone is better than you in some way, and that makes you bad. But it’s not true. You don’t have to be better than everyone.”

She stared, twisting her apron in her hands—shaking her head at his words.

“Thank you,” she said. “I think.”

"No, I—" he said, and sighed, eyes askant as though he looked inside himself. “Sometimes I don’t say the right words. I have to be more careful, caring, complete. They’ll remember what I say. But—it helps, sometimes, knowing that someone wants to help. Like how you helped me.”

“It—It was nothing.” She said, wringing her hands in the folds of her apron.

“It wasn’t nothing. It was everything.”

A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. They'd shared cherries in the pantry when no one watched and now he was here again; she looked around the empty kitchen. The servants had taken the pieces of caramel, nougat, and sweet puffs of pastry to either the hall above or the courtyard below. Still, there were sweet things among the detritus—broken _orielettes_ and meringues, squashed marzipan, trimmed pieces of sponge.

“Here,” she said— she unwrapped a bundle of cloth stuffed in a basket. Inside there was another pile of pastry, but this time a bright, oblong ball that fit neatly in the palm of her hand when she lifted it to him. It smelled faintly of oranges.

Where it should have been perfectly round, like a little bird's egg, it was cracked—too unsightly to be served.

“They’re all right,” she said. “Just—broken.”

“Thank you,” he said, and picked it up delicately in his fingers, as though afraid it would crumble.

"They're called _les soupirs d'Andraste_. Andraste’s sighs.”

He held it up to the candlelight—a golden confection of butter and air, almost transparent, dusted with silvery sugar.

“I’ve seen whole trays go untouched—people think they’re too pretty to eat," she said in a soft breath.

“But eating is half of what makes it pretty.”

“I know,” she said, and smiled widely. A shivering string of musical notes, an impermanent thrill of pleasure that ended as though they had never existed—nothing left but a fond memory.

“A pretty bead on a string, linked to a thousand others,” he said, watching her. Then his eyes turned back to the pastry, the delicate bauble; he turned it in his fingertips and it caught the weak candle-flame and reflected it, shimmering.

“They’re for the guests in the hall. Here." She plucked one up and held it to her lips, looking to him expectantly; he mimicked her, holding up the one she had given him. Together they bit into the airy sponge; Bri smiled as the butter melted into a hot breath in her mouth, a sweet sigh.

“I understand,” Cole said, nodding, and smiled too.

“Do you like them?”

He seemed to consider it, regarding the half-eaten pastry in his hands with that curious gaze at which he looked at everything.

“It’s warmth without words,” he said. “Like a kiss that fades into memory. You want another.”

She held up a second one and blushed—she put it back with the others.

“They’re—very sweet,” she said, rubbing at her cheek as she turned impulsively back to the empty stovetop. “We boil butter, milk, and sugar with flour until it sticks, mix in eggs and then drop them in oil.” She put down the basket of broken pastries.

“They’re more than that,” he said. “They make you smile when you see people eat them. An egg doesn’t do _that_.”

Bri smiled at that—briefly, her eyes shifting nervously to the floor.

“More people are smiling upstairs. Do you want to see?”

Even beneath her apron her dress was flecked with flour, butter-smears—her folded sleeves irrevocably stained. Her hair was stringy, stuck to her brow and neck, pressed flat by the little kitchen cap they all wore. Lille and her dress had danced down the steps to the courtyard and the liveried servants passed upstairs with silver trays—Bri was stuck poking ash in the kitchen hearth, marzipan under her nails.

“I don’t think I—” she began, and shook her head.

He held out his hand. All the little scrapes that had made him bleed had healed. A few crumbs from the round of pastry still stuck to his gloves, flakes of buttery crust that caught in the frayed fabric. These were the gifts they gave one another.

“All right,” she said. Quickly she pulled her apron over her head and left it, with her cap, in the basket of washing.

Bri took Cole’s hand. Together, they ascended the staircase to the hall above; behind the door was music and light—he held it open for her.

The eye of the Inquisition, emblazoned on every banner, seemed to shimmer and wink from all the vaults of the hall's high ceiling. United beneath to mark the latest year of this tumultuous Age were nobles from every nation of Thedas who dared to climb the icy Frostback paths and join their savior for her celebrations. They wore great confections of velvet and fur, jewels glinting at their throats and fingers, and many with those masks Orlesians wore on all public occasions.

From their place at the doorframe, peering out, Bri watched as the tables laden with food were attended to by servants carving and carrying. Whole deer brined in great vats of wine, pigs painted with port jelly and streaks of fine sugar, gold leaf laid on their flanks in bright sunbursts with the eye of the Inquisition—the kitchen had worked tirelessly for four days to bring this feast to the hall's long tables. Fabien had snapped his orders to Bri and Lille in short, sharp barks that nipped at their heels and sped their hands. Now Bri witnessed their work on the tables, laid out like a jewelers' shop.

In Ferelden the sweets are meals; hefty, hearty, stacks of fruit and pastry meant for more than a moment’s delight. But in Orlais the pastries trembled delicately, a single pristine fruit shining like a gemstone, a framed cake like a prized painting. Eliciting sighs as well as smiles, they were more than a frilly finish for a fuller dish—the cakes were laid on tiered trays like sculptures. Some had already been cut to pieces for the guests’ fickle palates, but one was still covered over with its frosting of flowers—violets and roses, beautifully done, delicately shimmering in the candlelight. Another had been obviously inspired by the frescoes the elven apostate had painted in the rotunda, but instead of the Inquisitor’s acts the cake’s layers were painted with a triptych of the final earthly moments of Andraste—her burning, her sacrifice, and her ascent—beautifully rendered with swirls of sugar and candied nuts. No one had dared cut into it yet, too afraid to ruin the picture.

“Fabien’s an artist,” Bri said—she spoke in a rushed whisper. "He trained in a real _pâtisserie_ before he came here."

"Yes," Cole said. "In his head, he burned the great tree to the ground. It keeps the ovens lit.”

She looked up at him—he was staring at the row of painted cakes. These curious, inscrutable things he said, as though divining meaning from the shape of clouds. It frightened her, sometimes, how he set himself apart.

The music started again—an elf was playing a _viol_ against his hip, while another beat a wide, flat drum. It shook her from her thoughts, and she glanced back to the food; on the opposite table, lines of colored _macarons_ lay on silver platters, shining in the candlelight. But they could not outshine the centrepiece, sent from the Empress herself; a rearing horse—the heraldry of the Trevelyans—made entirely of sugar and gilded with gold leaf. Its hooves flashed, kicking at the air, its eyes wide, the glowing curls of its mane delicately rendered in its fickle medium.

“A sugar sculpture,” Bri breathed. “Look at it—it’s so beautiful. It must have cost so much to bring here.”

Some of the _macarons_ at its base had already been eaten, and still more were being plucked up by the gloved hands of Orlesian nobles as they made their subtle dances about the room.

“I made those,” Bri said, her voice a breathed sigh of relief.

Cole was silent at her side. She watched a man—Fereldan, she could see in his face—let his eyes graze across the trays of _macarons_ before turning to walk away; he was stopped by an Orlesian woman who stood pointedly in this path.

"Will you not have a _macaron_ , my lord?" She was tall, her hands clasped together, her eyes obscured with a green mask so none could see where she looked. The man gave a short, halting bow, then shook his head.

"I'm afraid I've already eaten too much, my lady."

Bri imagined the woman was smiling, but she could not know. The Fereldan noble was still, one hand at the collar of his coat, leaning with an incline of his head as though waiting for the woman to step aside; she did not.

“Tell me,” she began, “what would you do if you were in a crowded room, and your own Queen Anora wished to enter?”

Bri recognized that tone, that echo of a voice that made their mask hum, the duplicity of a person whose face carries just one expression. The Fereldan looked to her, his brow furrowed.

“I don’t—”

“ _What_ would you do, my lord?”

He cleared his throat. “I would make room for her, my lady. Of course.”

“So you must do for the _macaron_ , Bann Jevris, for she is the Queen of Confectionary.”

She placed a gloved hand to the lips of her mask and laughed—a quiet, sharp titter like the drawing of a dagger. He glanced between her and the macarons for a halting moment, but he reached and plucked up a bright yellow macaron from the tray.

"Saffron with honey," Bri whispered to Cole. “I hope he doesn’t think it’s lemon, they’re the same colour but Fabien insisted we flavor them to Orlesian tastes and—”

She felt her heart stutter in her chest as she watched the nobleman eat the delicate biscuit whole, as though it were some coarse piece of soldier's rationing. He chewed like a horse—and then his chewing slowed, turned thoughtful, and he closed his eyes as if the candlelight glinting off the gaudy statue distracted him. He nodded in assent to an unknown question, as if someone had whispered something sweet and truthful in his ear.

From her place by the wall Bri smiled brightly, and held Cole by the wrist as she watched the nobleman take his moment's delight.

"Yes," the Orlesian said. "That is how I felt. It is very surprising to find confections of such quality so far from Val Royeux, and even more surprising that they would be in the middle of the mountains. But I suppose many things of quality have found ourselves in such a strange location, have they not?"

“The Inquisitor certainly has fine tastes, my lady.”

“Ah! I see you are a delight as well. Come,” she said, and imperiously slid her arm into his. “Let me introduce you to Madame de Fer.”

The masked woman guided the Bann away from the glittering tables and towards a door.

Cole took her hand again, and they passed the hall in silence. Bri kept her head down, stepping lightly past the nobles and their retinues. They moved quietly up the set of stairs set in the wall, eyes down, unnoticed, to the balcony where still other guests were standing and speaking to a woman who was, Bri knew, the lately elected Grand Enchanter of the reformed Circles. Her staff glimmered in her hand, carved crystal, and beside the candelabra the jewels at her throat shone like stars set against the night.

Her eyes shifted as she spoke and grazed across them, her gaze thin and sharp as a sheet of ice, and lingered for a harsh moment before turning back to her guests. Bri, transfixed in the doorway, took a breath before moving back to the darkness of the corridor.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered to him again—he lead her through another door in silence.

They were in the library; it was emptied of people. After the noise of the hall every one of her footfalls seemed to reverberate through the tower but Cole, quick and quiet, moved in that soundless way that used to unsettle her. Now she was grateful for it.

Bri could hear voices from the floor below; she peered over the edge of the railing to the rotunda floor, where a great round table had been set and where, since Thedas' rescue, the Inquisitor held more intimate meetings than the ones she conducted from her throne. Now a representative from the guild of _pâtissiers_ sat beside Donatien, with Fabien across. They spoke in quick words; Fabien looked like a bent sapling compared to them.

“—has all been very amusing.” The masked man was speaking, chuckling beneath his false, lipless face. "Somewhat like watching a dog who has learned to play the harp. But you cannot be seriously suggesting I admit an _elf_ to the guild."

Bri put a hand to her mouth; Fabien sat, his face beet-red, brow glistening in the candlelight as he bowed his head to the man's proclamation. The Orlesian didn’t even speak to him—he had turned to face Donatien directly.

"Of course he's an elf," Donatien said. "But you won't find a finer _pâtissier_ on either side of the Frostbacks."

Now Fabien raised his head, even as his shoulders trembled.

"You are staking your reputation—the Inquisition’s reputation—on a _rabbit_ ," the man said, and gestured at Fabien. “The boy belongs in the kitchen, not in the guild. I suggest you find a reputable _pâtissier_ if you wish the Inquisition to be considered worthy of the crafting guilds of Orlais. You people may have Celene’s respect, but you do not have mine. This is simply an _insult_.”

He stood, and left the room for the hall beyond. Donatien jumped up and followed, but when Fabien moved to stand he simply held up a flat palm and the elf clutched at his knees, frozen in place. He sat silent for a long moment, his back shuddering with the force of his breath.

At length Fabien stood, the chair legs screeching against the stone floor as he pushed it back. He braced himself against the table with both hands. There were pages of paper on the table, bearing seals, written in a sharp little script—he took one and crushed it futilely between his fingers, the sound thick and unsatisfying. He moved from the table, his body twisted as though he did not want to leave it, as though he were not allowed—he took heavy footfalls and echoed up to the ceiling.

Sharply, Fabien looked up to where Bri and Cole stood watching—Bri jumped back, to avoid his sight. Cole stayed at the railing, hunched, watching, swaying on the balls of his feet as he always did—but after a moment he stepped back, a hand over his eyes.

“Did he see you?” Bri whispered, but Cole said nothing. She listened to Fabien’s footfalls as he walked unsteadily across the room—after a long moment of silence she heard the door fall closed behind him. She peered down again, to the empty room. The candle flames flickered, then stilled to firm points. Servants always saw things they were never meant to see.

"You said—You said he 'burned the tree to the ground'?" she said quietly. "What did you mean?"

"The _vhenadal_ is burning in the alienage because he can’t bear to be in its shadow. There’s spite in every splinter—breaking boughs and branches to feed a fire in his chest. He fans the flames but its roots go deep. He can't dig them out. He feels them in every heartbeat."

Fabien came from the alienage in Val Royeaux—she’d heard stories, only, of its squalor, its narrow streets that blotted out the sunlight. Its gates were locked day and night. But the place still stood, she’d never heard of a fire there—but Bri knew the tree, the _vhenadal_ as the elves called them, in Val Chevin’s alienage had long been cut down for firewood; it was, she had been told, too common to see burned stumps instead of trees in the alienages now. One day the tree ceased to have any meaning, and then it was gone like every other meaningless thing in a place that was forced to eat itself to stay alive.

"I don't—Did you talk to him?" she asked, and put a hand to his shoulder. He looked at it for a moment, her splayed fingers crusted with pastry, her thin wrist.

"I can hear him," he said. "He's very loud. It's an old hurt—older than he is. He keeps feeding the fire. He doesn't know how to put it out—and he thinks all that would be left is ash.”

He looked down the length of her arm, then down at her. He shook his head.

“He’s jealous,” Cole said. “Of you. Of everyone. Of their hands and ears and eyes. Sometimes, in his head, he puts himself on the pyre. It’s sadder when he does that.”

How much more he saw, watching the same scene as she. What was it that had told him all these things? She and Fabien had circled one another like frightened dogs for so long—watching, wary, unable to see past one another. She did not know when they would stop.

“He’s hurting and—I can’t help.”

Bri shook her head, stepping back, twisting the skirts of her dress between her fingers.

“You’re—No. He never wants _anyone’s_ help.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “He does, but the asking hurts him, too. He can’t let the wound show, can’t let the words out when he thinks they’re weapons.”

He glanced down to the floor below, where their presence lingered like smoke floating up from a burnt-out candle.

“People look at him and see one thing. Even you do that. That’s—”

He stopped himself short, and seemed to look inwards for a long moment, head bent, eyes closed.

“Everyone sees me now, too.”

The pale planes of his face were hidden in the half-lit room. He looked to her now, his mouth turned down as though saddened by what he saw in her.

“There’s something very— _frightening_ , about being seen. Looking into someone’s eyes but you only see yourself—a mirror reflecting a mirror and you can never see behind it. I’m trying to learn, but still trying to remember. Sometimes I think they are the same thing. Sometimes I know they are very different.”

His expression shifted—that same inscrutable gaze which made her feel as though she was a blank page and he, with daubs of dark ink, could trace her in words she could never understand. She squirmed, stepping from one foot to the other, as he spoke.

“The servants, they stare at me and whisper—too different, what’s he doing, who is that, _strange boy_.” His voice quickened—she stilled, listening. “I used to be so afraid that no one would remember me—now they remember me and I don’t want them to—not— _not like that_.”

His eyes were on her; she had noticed how sometimes they darted, quick, quiet, wide and fearful like prey’s eyes—other times they watched keenly, like an artisan appraising each thought. Now they were simply sad. She turned away to him, ashamed of herself.

“We can’t help how people think of us.”

“We can’t?” he asked, and his voice fell softy, fringed with sadness.

“I don’t think so.”

“You think it’s true,” he said—but his voice had dropped to a whisper, a little mournful sound as though the thought upset him. Her eyes shifted nervously away, afraid. He touched her hand; she looked back. His eyes, soft, were on her.

“You don’t think of me the way the others do.”

She shrugged, and shook her head.

“I know you better,” she said. “We’re friends.”

“We are?”

“Yes," she said, unsure. “I—I think so.”

“Thank you.” His voice was lit with that guileless shiver, a quaver in his throat that made all the words dance with the joy of what he was saying.

“I’m glad you can see me now.”

Bri smiled gently, and nodded. She took his hand again.

The ravens puffed their feathers as they watched the pair of them come up to the landing. They preened in their cages and settled their heads against their breasts, unconcerned with the faint glimmer of the music that drifted up to them from the balcony door. Beside the Chantry alcove there was a little brazier, its embers softened to a whisper of red.

From the ceiling’s centre, from which the birds occasionally took flight, there was a light snowfall which melted to stray drops of water as it entered this warm place.

“I shouldn’t be up here,” Bri said quietly, though the rookery, like the library, had been abandoned for the festivities outside. “I’m not allowed.”

“The birds don’t mind.”

She looked up at their cages, hanging from the criss-crossed ceiling beams. They had been fatted on the elves’ little cakes and they clucked like contented hens.

“They wouldn’t,” she said. “It’s not them I’m worried about.”

He watched her in silence. She sighed.

“People don’t see us. Or—well, they don’t look at us, not until we’re doing something wrong. Not really. We’re meant to be there, but not be seen. It’s worse down in the kitchens—nobody sees us at all. I don’t know if that’s worse.”

She was silent for a long moment, then shook her head as if she could condemn her own foolish thoughts, as if she could shake them from her like dead leaves from the branches of a tree.

“I understand.”

She knew by his voice and the way his fingertips grazed the creases of her palm that he understood her completely—as though he could read whatever language she was written in. She drew back, and looked at him fully.

“You see us. But— _how_?” she asked, and moved to stand by his side. Nervously, she lifted the brim of his hat. His eyes were wide, startled and bright like a wild animal’s that gleamed by lanternlight. She pulled the hat from his head; it was surprisingly heavy—she placed it on the table, among the papers. His head ducked, hiding his face beneath the long, lank strands of his blonde hair. 

“I like my hats,” he said, sullen. He seemed smaller without it—without the shadows to add shape and depth to his body. So thin, he hunched as though ducking to half his size; he seemed to wilt under the weight of her gaze. She looked away. 

The stone eyes of Andraste looked down at her from their place in the alcove—only she, beyond the cooing birds, saw them here. The last time she had been up here she had fed them and watched the courtyard from the window; she was reminded of falling feathers.

"I saw you here, weeks ago," she said. "You were doing something—you were dropping feathers in front of the Tranquil, I think. Why were you doing that?"

Without the shadow of his hat he could no longer hide his face; he looked, suddenly, inescapably sad.

"She's so hard to hear. She's so quiet. But there's something there—something that's been hid away. She used to like animals and said she can't remember why—but she wants to be near the birds. I thought I could—“

His voice trailed away.

"I don't think the Tranquil can want anything," she said. They did their work in silence, late into the night, never asking for more from anyone. A shadow—light, quiet—passed over his eyes.

“No.” His voice was firm. It echoed down the spiralling halls of the tower. “They’re not like that. They can want. They’re a step behind, too. You think they can’t dream. But life—can feel like a dream."

His eyes stared down to the floor, his shoulders slack, thin as a rail. The borders of his body were indistinct in the torchlight, even without the shadows he always carried with him.

"Sometimes I don’t know what it is to be awake.”

The words she wanted to say were caught between the flat press of her lips—she understood, in a way she did not want to say, exactly what he meant.

She went to the window, where the frost webbed between the diamond-patterned panes of glass. In the courtyard, far below, the elves were playing some sort of fast-paced jig; a bright coil of strings amid the darkness, tightening, tensing, releasing with a shout of sound.

Bri went to the door and opened it; the cold swept around the hem of her flour-stained dress as she peered down.

“Lille is dancing,” she said, watching from the doorframe. From the top of the tower she could see the courtyard below, gazing down like some vigilant statuary on the lives that moved along without her. Even here she could see Lille’s silver dress, chiming like a bell as she spun to the faint music. Bri didn’t recognize the man she danced with now, clinging with the same bright fervor as she had with her in the kitchen. How pretty she looked, even from afar—like a star, impossible to approach.

“You don’t have to be pretty like her. You can be pretty like you.”

She looked to him, her brow furrowed. She was silent as he stared passively, stood by the edge of the cluttered table that held all of the spymaster’s correspondence. The music had stilled and quieted between songs and when Bri looked back to the courtyard Lille was gone.

 “Everyone worries about that. Should I worry, too?” He raised his head slightly but sank, more, into his shoulders as he asked. She would have laughed, but he looked at her with such concern, eyes obscured by the unkempt tangles of his hair.

“I don’t think you should worry,” she said. Her voice stumbled softly over the words as she spoke. “You’re—pretty like you, too.”

“Oh,” he said, and when she smiled he returned it, more brightly, relieved. “Good! I never used to worry, but—”

He was quiet for a moment, his eyes on his hands as he pressed his fingertips together.

“When you speak it’s like—a flash of light. Even when it's very dark. And I can see—everything.”

He came to her side. The music began again and carried up to them still, echoing over the mountaintops.

“Wind and wolfsong,” he said. He was staring off to the mountains beyond. “They make music against the cold. They’re lonely. The night is full of silence.”

He looked down at the dancers below, and smiled.

"They're doing the same!" He said it with that delighted upturn of his voice, a bubbling laugh like Lille’s as she lay amongst the flour and sipped wine. How jealously Bri had watched her—fearfully wanting, watching for something that lay so easily within her grasp. He stood at her side in these secret spaces and kept her company—offered and never took. He looked into her eyes and reflected everything.

"Dance with me," she said—declarative, then, shy of herself. She looked back to balcony, and the courtyard beyond. The music was faint, but still overpowered the chaste strings of the hall. "Please?"

Now it was his turn to watch her, wide-eyed and confused.

“I’ve never danced before,” he said. 

“I haven’t in—a long time,” Bri admitted. She moved to wring her hands in her skirts but stopped herself. Hands used to kneading cold dough or shaping dead rabbits out of marzipan. 

"There’s a lot to think about at once," he said. She nodded.

"I know. You’ve—got to think with more than just your head."

For so long they had stood separate, stuck in the snow digging for something long lost. Now they would go where the other lead them. Again she extended her hand and again he, shakily, took it. She moved. He followed. The door went out to the balcony, high above the courtyard. Bri turned to him.

"Here, this—I think this is what everyone down there is doing now. Some Antivan dance—Lille showed me."

A silly lie, she knew—Lille had shown her nothing, but Bri had watched from the wall. Bri briskly stepped closer to him and picked up his hands by the wrists. Cautiously she placed them—at the small of her back, the other held aloft by her own. His eyes dropped.

“Don’t look at your feet,” she said in her kitchen tone; she brought her hand to his chin for a brief moment, lifting his eyes. “Look at me.” 

He nodded. Briskly she brought her fingertips back to his shoulder, aware of the press of his palm at the small of her back. Her eyes moved away, past him, to where the sky shone bright and clear, filled with stars. Below, in the courtyard, the music timed out their dance—the couples came together in the same designs.

"Will you look at me, too?" he asked. She smiled with one corner of her mouth, briefly, and nodded.

They began; a dozen muttered sorries as he trod on her feet over and over.

"Sorry," he said again, his eyes shifting away as she let go of him and he stepped back, his shoulders hunched. His ears and nose were pink-tipped from the cold.

"It's my fault, I—" she began, then shook her head. "Let me—I can show you an old Orlesian dance. It's much simpler."

She raised her hand, palm flat, and looked to him expectantly; he put his palm to hers, cautious. She nodded, smiling meekly.

"We take two steps," she said—they did so, careful of one another, matching the length of their strides.

"Now we turn," she continued. Again they did, taking another two steps. The music below wasn't counting out the time, unsuited to this dance. Still, she smiled. They did these little movements, this ritual performed in manor halls to bring together couples who were not allowed to touch. They stepped back from one another, their fingertips pressed together in the air, and drew together—and then he took her by the waist and they spun, as she had with Lille—light and uncaring, laughing together. No sugar to overturn, no scent of wine or interruption. They blurred. The cold air rushed over them both and they held together.

Their dance stilled as the music was drowned by the wind along the balcony. She shivered and his arms came around her more firmly, holding her there with him. Quiet, cautious, she felt him as he pressed his cheek to hers. Here, at the close of the year, she felt his breath ghost across the cold-pricked skin of her neck. His chest rose and fell against her own. His lashes fluttered against her cheek. Their hearts beat, dyssynchronous, disparate, according to their need.

The moon’s light made diffuse and dissolute shadows—everything was cast in a colourless negative. She drew away, to better see him. Cole, pale and insubstantial, looked almost like a ghost; the light made his skin gleam and washed out every detail. Flakes of ice hung in the still air—they swirled around his face, his hands, glinting, diaphanous, a drift of ice and memory. 

And then, bright and vivid, the Chantry bells chimed the new year, rolling in the rhythmic beating, blurring everything together. Time, suspended like the snow, began again with the heavy sounds of their hearts.

The falling flakes of ice turned back to water as they slid down his pale face.

“I—I—” she began, and fell back into silence. He did not move his hands; she stood, enveloped by him, snow fluttering gently against her hair, falling on her eyelashes; she blinked them away. She had never noticed before that his eyes were possessed of a curious quiet, a serenity that seemed to still her own heart, pressed as it was to his. A sad gentleness. As if, until this moment, she had selfishly only looked at her own face reflected there instead of what he held beneath. She had thought of them as mirrors, while she—a pane of glass over a painting, he had said—always holding herself beyond anyone’s touch.

With the tips of her fingers she pushed the lank strands of his hair aside.Her hands, so used to kneading, all the cracks and creases stained white; she lightly touched the bridge of his nose, his cheekbone, his brow—appraising, approaching, drawing him back, drawing him to her.

She raised up on her toes and kissed his cheek, firm and flushed beneath her lips, to keep him from dissolving into night.

"Thank you." His voice was a soft, faded rustle, like the susurration of dried leaves. His skin was warm, so warm, as he clung to her—he smelled sweetly of sweat, of heat, of hearthfire, and she of caramel and creams. His breath misted before him.

Quietly she slipped away, her eyes drawn down, shy of herself again. She drew her arms to her chest, pulling back. His arms fell, lank, at his sides. Looking away, she shook her head, her hands clasped at her elbows.

“I have to—I have to go back,” she said in a pained shiver.

She padded back to the door and slipped inside, away from his sight.

He stood on the battlements amid snow that settled on his skin and melted away, stealing the impression of her warmth, the light touch that left him with little but a fast fading memory of hearts and hands.

 


	7. Chapter 7

Bri lay awake in her narrow bed, slipping in and out of the moments of the night before. Every part of her unwound at the memory. Too much to bear in the present but here, now, she could allow herself; her heart jumped and shuddered, her fingers twining with the rough bedcovers, twisting beneath the sheets as she pressed her knees together. She had kissed his pale cheek and walked away. It made her blush, thinking of it; she passed a palm over her eyes, as if he watched her now.

She moved back and forth through each feeling, each luminous point across her skin, against her palms, within her chest. She slid her fingertips down her neck. Behind her eyes, she saw him, saw the moonlight. They lead one another by the hand, so much said wordlessly as they shared these hidden pieces of one another. A breathless joy shared in the quiet cracks of the day. She had tried to say ‘thank you’ in a closer language.

But still frightened, embarrassed, shying back at every heartbeat, she had left him. Overwhelmed by something larger than her knowing and choosing; something she could not grasp with her hands, these unfamiliar shapes of want and shadow. The things she kept inside—knotted up—forgotten.

She opened her eyes. The moonlight had long slipped away from the stones and left her nothing but the early morning darkness and all the day’s demands.

Bri turned and, with sleep-stiffened fingers cracking at the flint, lit the wick of the oil lamp at her bedside. A twist of lint floating in a little saucer of animal fat, stinking and offering little light, but enough to dress by. Bri dragged herself from her narrow cot.  A rustle of mismatched bedclothes, a creaking snore, the groan of a cot as someone turned over; the servants, bundled in blankets in their beds, slept in fitful shivers. The dormitories for the castle’s servants were long rows of beds in a close, low-ceilinged room. Ash-lined braziers stood at each corner, the stones behind them blackened with use. A few rows down, Lille’s bed lay empty, its covers still crisply tucked beneath a lumpy, hay-filled mattress. Though the servants made their beds every morning before their work began, Bri wondered if Lille had slept in hers at all.

Standing, Bri padded over to the corner where they did their washing; clothes hung on makeshift lines suspended from the ceiling, long stockings and skirts and handkerchiefs that had missed the day’s laundry. A squat basin of water sat on the floor. It wasn’t private, barely covered by a tatty stretch of linen. With a bracing breath she pulled off her nightdress and stripped to her skin.

There was a dirty looking glass propped against the stone wall, resting on a broken bureau discarded from the better rooms of Skyhold. She could only see cuts of herself in it, turning; her little wrists and her scarred fingers, skin stretched over shoulder-blades, knees bruised from kneeling on stone floors, the scratches of hair between her legs, a little breast with a nipple pinched by the cold. _You can be pretty like you_ , he’d said; she turned away, and with reddened knuckles cracked the thin film of ice that mirrored the water’s surface.

Bri scraped a cake of hard soap along her neck and shoulders, flanks and thighs until she was as pink and pearlescent as a skinned rabbit. Then a plain white linen slip, a pair of clean woollen stockings. The rest over that, the trussing of her stays, an underskirt, a simple brown dress worn daily and washed infrequently; the flour was beaten from it each night before it was worn, same as the day before. She pulled her wool cloak over herself and left the dormitory, closing the door gently behind her as the other servants’ caught their last hours of rest before the day began.

Bri kicked at the pathless snow as she walked the familiar route through the courtyards to the kitchen. Winter clouds had rolled across the mountaintops in the night and had settled over Skyhold; the snow, falling thickly, had finally dispersed those scattered celebrants who had kept their flames burning through to the early hours. At this early hour the sky was stainless, the scoured stone walls webbed with frost, the windowpanes clouded over. The confusion of footprints across the courtyards had filled, flattened, and disappeared without a trace. In its winter blanketing Skyhold was another peak amongst the Frostbacks; quiet, still, one of a white-robed congregation.

But there were other signs: the fire pit that had roasted the crucified lambs was now a smear of snow and ash, the bones from the meal thrown into the confusion of cold, charred wood that glittered in the dark. Someone had been sick by the well, sulphuric streaks of half-digested, sugared fruit stuck in the snow. The upper branches of the leafless trees were swollen and bent, creaking beneath their burden; a few had cracked and split under the weight. As she made her way through the lower courtyard, Bri saw a shivering elf scrubbing at one of the barn’s walls with a dampened cloth clutched in his red-tipped fingers; his efforts had only just begun to smear a crude chalk drawing of what was still recognisably Skyhold’s pinch-faced steward.

The grime lay just beneath this nascent layer of white; peeled back, stripped away, it could still be seen.

Faintly, Bri saw white smoke rising from the kitchen chimney—worried, she skittered up the stairs to the unlatched door.It was Fabien; he stood, his shoulders hunched, over a lit stovetop, stirring drinking chocolate in a bowl over a pot of boiling water. The scent was heavy and acidic, mingling with the smoke from the burgeoning fires. A bleary-eyed lady's maid looked on, waiting for the last addition to be laid on the tray-table for her employer's morning meal.

Fabien looked up when the door shut behind her. He stared for a long moment, his wrist stilling its frantic movement, as she shook the snow from her shoes in the dim candlelight.

“Who—”

“The Marquise d’Osseux,” he said shortly, and turned back to his work. Fabien hefted the pot and poured the chocolate into a delicate silver teacup, which he laid on the tray beside a little saucer of biscuits. He stooped and placed a sprig of frozen lilac beside them, which gleamed wetly in the low light and melted its sickly shedding scent.

Thus plated, the servant hoisted the tray and bore it away from the kitchen, disappearing behind the door. Immediately Fabien began dragging the dough from its bowls to knead for the day’s baking.

“When did the Marquise—”

“Her carriage was delayed by the snow.”

“How did you—”

“Her retainer came in a few hours ago with a menu.”

“No, I—”

“ _Enough_ , Briony.”

His eyes were tired, and his voice—usually snapping like a switch—was blurred, slowed. She watched him stoop over the stovetop, his face lit by the red gleam beneath. He hadn't slept—she could recognize that in him. But then he cleared his throat and his voice grew firm again.

“Get to work.”

The kitchen was empty—bereft, almost, of all its contents. The night’s feasts had dug into all their stores and left nothing but sooty grease on all the kitchen surfaces and burnt straw crunching beneath their feet. The pantries were similarly emptied; all the summer fruit had been eaten in one evening’s attempt to banish the season. As the valley strained to resupply them, these next few weeks would be for fasting and reflecting before Wintersend, when the Divine would visit Skyhold for the first time since she donned her new name.

Still, the table had to be laid to the Marquise’s demands. For now it was only drinking chocolate, but as Fabien relayed the noblewoman’s menu—strained soups, a full afternoon tea complete with _choux_ pastries and puffed creams, dishes she didn’t even know—Bri turned to the sacks of flour to begin the day’s bread.

Feeling came back into her limbs. She thought of the stories they’d told one another, elves singing from the orange peel and how prophet’s laurel got its name. The taste of cherries wound with his feathery lips at her touch. Between her fingertips, the flour was soft and powdery. Linked by this and memory only, she she reached and felt, faintly, a rustle of wheat beneath her palms, the scent of summer straw from the farmer’s fields, a scratch of tree bark at her back. The flour pulled and pressed between her palms, sticking and dragging. It changed beneath her. In the dawn quiet, she let her hands sink into the dough, let her thoughts sink into her sigh.

The door clattered open; a masked woman stood by the fire holding, by her thumb and forefinger, a little cage covered over by a thick cloth. Its hem  was trimmed with gold, glimmering as though alight. She walked with quick steps towards the worktable, metal heels snapping the straw.

“What is that?” Fabien asked, and jabbed his chin at the cage. The maid didn’t turn her placid stare to him; she briskly flashed a lace handkerchief across the table’s surface, then placed the little cage top it. She turned to Bri.

“My lady eats _ortolan_ every week,” she said beneath her mask. “She has brought this one from Val Royeaux. She loves the bones. When you cook it, do not neglect the bones.”

Her accent was a heavy Orlesian; standing closer, Bri could see the row of teeth—carved ivory—that lined her face just above her too-red lips. She curtsied; Bri returned it, then looked to the cage.

“What’s an—”

“A songbird, cooked whole.” Fabien’s voice was flat.

“When—When does she want it?” Bri asked.

“Before she retires, but after her second bath,” said the maid with a flourish of her gloved hand.

“Maker,” Bri whispered.

“The Marquise _trusts_ your expertise. Do not _betray_ it.” Turning, the maid left them with this chirping demand.

Fabien turned back to his work. Bri watched the cage for a moment, then went to it and lifted the flap of fitted cloth that covered it. The bird squatted on its perch within, its dull feathers bleeding into the shadows; when the light caught its black eyes it began shrieking. Bri jumped back, pulling her hands to her chest.

“Maker’s _breath_!”  Fabien yelled over the sound of the bird’s wailing. “Put it _away_.”

Shakily Bri grabbed at the cage, the silk handkerchief falling to the floor. She carried it to the hall, then ducked into the pitch-black pantry and placed it on the shelf beside a row of delicate bottles she steadied with her fingertips.

The bird quieted in the dark, the echoes in the empty room dying to a whisper. Careful of herself, she ran her fingers over the golden thread that wound its designs, rough beneath her touch. She heard the creature shuffle in its cage, unaware of all the things that kept it there.

Chilly, bare, the pantry held none of the warmth and candlelight of  her memory—she wiped her hands on her apron, her skin pricking in the cold, as she went back to the close heat of the kitchen.

“Lille is late,” Fabien said when she entered. He was kneading heavily at his brioche; Bri went back to her table.

“No—No. Lille’s never late,” she said, twisting the dough in her hands.

“She’s _late_.”

Bri pinched it between her fingers until they ached. She remembered the empty bed.

“I don’t think she came in to the dormitory last night.”

“She probably went back with someone,” Fabien said, his frown curling over the words. “Probably drunk.”

“She’s never missed a morning. Not once. We need to tell Master Don—“

“No!”

She turned to look at him; his shoulders were shaking—he clutched a stirring spoon in one white-knuckled hand. He nearly jumped when the commis chef and a kitchenhand came in through the hall door, rolling a barrel between them. Fabien closed the space between himself and Bri.

“No,” Fabien said, his voice low. She could see all the thin veins beneath his eyes. “There’s no need to tell Donatien—she’ll be here. We can’t give him a reason to—”

His voice faltered; his gaze darted across her face. The commis stacked the barrel in the corner and, with the kitchenhand’s help, was prying off its lid with a crowbar. The scent of fish—sour salt, stores for the winter—flooded the room.

"She'll be here," Fabien said. He went back to his work, crouching before the oven and testing its heat with a shivering hand.

"I think it's off," the commis muttered to his helper, who simply shrugged.

"Just salt it and mix it with something fresh and Donatien won’t care."

"You sure?"

"Does it matter? We've got nothing else. Most of the guests have left, anyway.”

The stench was overpowering. Bri turned away and peered through the open kitchen door until the cold nipped her nose.

“Get the milk from Abelard,” Fabien said, frowning. “Since Lille hasn’t.”

“Oh—yes, all right,” Bri said, and hurried to leave the stink of fish behind.

Dawn had fully opened above them; the mountains glinted like teeth in the light of a new day—a  new year they had all lived to see, after the sky had torn open.

Servants who had risen to light the torches in the castle and stoke the fires in the hearths were stood around the ash-pit shovelling the remains into a wheelbarrow, while a quick-footed elf sped the refuse to the spot where he could tip the contents down into the spring that ran beneath the castle, where the water would bear it away to the valley with all the other waste.The merchants’ wagons were opened, and Bri saw other members of the kitchen haggling with red-faced purveyors of pigs’ ribs and stretched, gutted nugs. The carcasses of two sheep swayed in the cold air, skinless and headless, ready to be cut to pieces. A whole peacock, its bright feathers flashing in the morning light, hung by its limp claws, its beak gaping open as its neck swayed. Two dogs fought over entrails. Bouquets of bone hung bundled up for meagre soups.

Alongside the brightly-colored merchants' caravans there were the plain carts that came up from the valley each morning. They carried what little things they could provide, what little could thrive in the mountains. Meat, fish, forage foods for the animals. One of the carts from the valley with tins filled with milk destined for different parts of the castle. Leaning beside them was a young man, picking at a hole in his jacket. It was only when she came close that she could smell the drink on his breath, as though the night's festivities had never truly ended for him.

“You’re Abelard?” Bri asked.

“Yeah?”

“I’m from the kitchen.”

He looked her up and down carefully—as though he didn’t believe her through her flour-sprayed apron.

“You’re not Lille.”

“No, I—”

“Do you know her?”

“Yes.”

“She ill or something?”

“No, she’s just—”

“Tell her she still owes me that kiss.”

Bri stammered, stepping back—he laughed in a low, short spurt.

“She said if I won the bet on the rope-burning she’d give me a kiss, since she had no money left. Tell her I’m still waiting for it.”

“I—All right.”

She moved to grab at a tin of milk but he leaned towards her and she stepped back again. He bobbed his head to catch her gaze—she looked away, eyes shifting to avoid him.

“I’d ask _you_ for it, but you’re not as pretty.”

No head for debts, he moved back to let her pass. With a tight-lipped grimace she hoisted the jug up by its handles.

“Thank you,” she said, and then gritted her teeth. She turned, his eyes on her back as she struggled to keep the tin aloft. The cold bit at her arms and face as she hurriedly made her way back across the courtyard.

She arrived to the sound of sharpening knives; the commis had come and was honing his edge for the day ahead. The stink of fish had been covered up by the re-sealed barrel but it still lingered in the corners of the room.

“Finally,” Fabien snapped, and wrested the tin of milk from Bri’s hands and dragged it across the straw. He ladled a few cupfuls into a well of flour and began to knead anew. Bri went back to her dough.

“Is it ready?” Fabien called.

“It’s starting to push back,” she said. Coming to her side, he reached in and pinched a piece of it, which slowly filled back into place under their eyes.

“Where is _Lille?_ ” he muttered under his breath. Bri looked into his eyes; large, sulphuric, they betrayed, if just for a moment, worry—then they went hard again.

"Heyup!"

Lowri was at the kitchen door with two shining fish; she held them by their gaping, teeth-lined mouths, slick, ice-crusted bodies wriggling in the air. They were nearly as big as she.

"Someone take these off me!" she called—her arms were shaking with the weight.

“Grand!” The commis launched forward and scooped up both fish by their gills. He slapped them on the table, and the pair of them drew their knives from their belts. In one short movement they had slit both fish's bellies and their insides spilled out.

“Bet a witch could read my fortune in it,” Lowri said.

“Yeah? What’s that say, then?”

Lowri leaned over the fish’s viscera; the pale stomach veined with blue, the white fat, the too-red liver. She pointed to a stretch of translucent membrane that spilled out in a puckered whorl.

“Well _this_ means I’ll have _lots_ of bairns, yeah? And that,” she pointed to a strand of intestine, “and that means I’ll start my own Dalish clan with all that lot, won’t I?”

“And who’ll start your clan with you, with all those babies, huh?” the commis said, grinning. Lowri pulled at a piece of white flesh until the fish’s stomach dropped from its body.

“Looks like Fabien,” she said. Laughing, the commis bundled up the fish’s innards and threw them with a wet slap into the bucket with the other waste.

"Can you do that _outside_?" Fabien muttered as he crouched before the oven door. They rolled their eyes but still, the commis hefted up his dead fish and moved towards the door; a kitchenhand followed with the offal. Lowri left for the pantry, but Bri reached out when she passed again.

"Lowri," Bri said, catching her with a basket of unpeeled potatoes. "Have you seen Lille?"

"No," she answered, and took a few steps away before turning back to her. "Why? Hasn't she been here?"

"I haven't seen her all morning,” Bri said.

"She could be back in the dormitory," Lowri offered. “Could have come back after you left.” Bri looked to her, but she shook her head.

"I can't," she said. “Send someone else."

At that moment the door opened, bringing a gust of cold air; they glanced up—it was a scullery maid, laden with the fish’s fillets.

“You,” Fabien said, pointing at the girl. “Go back to the dormitory and see if Lille’s there.”

“Me?” she said, laying the meat on the table; her skirts fluttered with glittering scales.

“Yes!”

“But the Sisters are always in the garden! They’ll think I’m _skiving_ if I go back to the dormitory!” she whimpered. Bri grabbed the yoke with its clattering buckets and held it out to her.

“Then get more water from the garden well, too. Just—peek in the dormitory.”

The girl’s eyes turned sly as she slipped her shoulders beneath the wooden beam.

“All right, but—can I have a biscuit after?”

“Just _do_ it!” Fabien said, scowling. The girl jumped up and bolted down the steps, the buckets hitting her legs as she ran.

“Ridiculous,” he hissed, and turned back to his work. Bri glanced at him, then back to Lowri as she dropped her basket of potatoes in the corner by a stool, taking the knife from her apron.

“Weren’t you with her?” Bri asked shakily. Lowri nodded, turning the potato in her hand.

“Yeah, but I left early,” she said. “I lost a bunch of money betting on the rope-burning, so, no more drinks.”

“Oh.”

“And Abelard was being _creepy_.”

"That—makes sense."

Lowri shrugged, dropping the potato in a bucket of water. Bri went back to her work, running between the ovens and the pantry, rushed with the tasks of Lille’s work and her own.It wasn’t long before the girl returned, panting up the stairs with the water. Lowri looked at her with expectant eyes; the girl simply shook her head.

“No—No one at all,” she said. She wrinkled her nose. “But someone left their cloak to dry over the fire and now it’s charred to a crisp. Some stupid cow could have burned down our beds!”

“Well done, then,” Lowri said, her voice sharp. “You _didn’t_ find Lille.”

“Was it _yours_?”

Lowri scowled, and took quick steps across the stones to where the girl stood defiant.

“Stop it.” Fabien snapped his fingers at the girl, who shrugged and turned back to her own work, stepping up on an upturned bucket before the table to reach the herbs that hung from the ceiling. Lowri frowned.

“Someone really should let Donatien know,” Bri said in a pained whisper. Lowri shook her head, eyes wide, brow furrowed.

“Are you simple? We don’t want Lille to get in trouble.”

“But what if—”

“She’s _just late_. She’ll be back. We don’t need to get Donatien about this. We'll send a message down to the the valley," Lowri said. “We can ask one of those pilgrims to tell the launderer there that Lille’s missing.”

"All right," Bri said, and passed a hand over her brow. "I'm sure she's just—I'm sure she's just down in the valley. Maybe she's still with Cerys."

Lowri nodded, her lips stretched across a smile. She gave Bri a playful shove—Bri stepped back, rubbing her shoulder.

“See?” Lowri said. “No problem.”

She turned to Fabien and called his name; he met her eyes with gritted teeth.

“What do you want?”

“Can you write something for us?”

He was one of the few among them who could; his hard eyes softened, and he nodded with an agonised jerk of his head. Quickly he tore a scrap of paper from a back page of the account book on the shelf , and dabbed the pen in the near-empty inkwell beside it. The table was covered with pieces of fish and the day’s work—Bri turned and Fabien lay the paper across her back.

“Go on.”

“Write it to Norah in the laundry. She can read it,” Lowri said. “Say to find Cerys, and say that Lille hasn’t come.”

“What about—” Bri began, but held her breath as Fabien pressed the paper more firmly against her shoulder.

“We don’t want _them_ to get in trouble, either,” Lowri said. “If we find her before supper, then no one has to know.”

She felt Fabien scratching at the page, piecing out the words with the nib prodding at her back.

"You didn't go with her?" Fabien asked, and Bri, with a gentle tremor, shook her head.

"No," she said. "I was here. I was alone."

“Of _course_ ,” he said, and gave a short breath of laughter. He lifted the page from her back; she felt her shoulders twinge as she turned. Carefully he blew the ink dry and folded the page.

“I saw a group before,” Lowri said. “They should still be by the gate if you hurry.”

Bri nodded and, taking the note in her hands, went back into the cold.

The steps were treacherous; the courtyard snow had been packed and frozen into slick ice; some of the servants were busy breaking it with shovels. The sky was a cloudless blue, the sun casting short shadows across the stones. She picked her way down to the courtyard, arms clinging to her pinpricked body.

There was a mule and cart being set up by the gate with a handful of people stood beside it. They all wore the fluttering eye of the Inquisition on their breasts, the little souvenirs sold by the Chantry sisters to every pilgrim who came to visit the Herald’s seat of power. She approached one, a man wrapped in an expensive coat.

"Messere," she said, and touched his elbow; he turned to look down at her.

"Yes?"

His nose looked like it had been broken several times; when he crossed his arms over his chest, she saw old cuts on his fingers as he toyed with a gold chain that hung heavily around his neck.

"You're going down to the valley,” she said. He nodded. “We need to get a message to a human woman named Norah in the laundry there. Could you give this to her—please?"

He was silent for a moment, looking down the arc of his nose. At last, he spoke.

"I'm wondering how much that's worth to you."

“I—What?”

"I think you heard."

Her eyes fixed on him, she groped under her apron and pulled out the little coin purse that dangled on a cord at her waist—all her meagre savings. The first coin she pried from the pouch was a silver. He saw it before she could hastily shove it back.

“That’ll do fine,” he said, and raised a calloused palm.

Quietly she placed the coin into his waiting hand. The lion's embossed face glinted at her with its mocking grin. She covered it with the folded note.

“We’ll see if I can find her,” he said as his fingers closed over the offerings.

“Maker be with you, Messere,” Bri said, pressing every word.

His eyes narrowed for a moment, the coin clutched in his hand.

“And you, girl.”

Bri walked back over the ice to the kitchen stairs, eyes down as she followed the cracked footprints along the path. She stopped for a moment by the well to catch her breath; it cold made her chest ache. Her eyes lifted to the battlements, where the sun glanced off the soldiers’ helmets as they walked in their rotation. She allowed herself to hope, for a brief moment, for the sight of Cole sat swaying between the wall’s crenelated ramparts, kicking his shoe against the stones. He saw things, always—the switch falling on Lille’s fingers, the flames that Fabien fanned. How she had felt when she had last caught sight of Lille flashing in her silver dress, dancing in the dark.

But he was not there—just the ravens that trilled and cackled and made her think of the cage’s promise in the pantry, of dead rabbits planted like bitter seeds.

“Briony, right?”

Bri turned—it was Linna, wrapped tight in a cloak, the tips of her pointed ears reddened by the cold. Her hair pulled back, the edges of sea-green, unfinished tattoos were visible at her hairline and neck. Bri let her eyes linger too long—Linna frowned.

“You work with Lille, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell her to get me my damned _macarons_ already?”

“She hasn’t come in today,” Bri said.

The elf’s brow furrowed for a moment, and then she seemed to wave away the thought, shrugging.

“She still has the dress. Tell her to give that back, too. Tell her when she turns up, tell her I’ll be in the Chantry garden.” She shook her head, muttering to herself. “Andraste’s tits, it’s my day off and I still have to wait around for shems.”

“I—” Bri began, but Linna shook her head.

“Just let her know.”

“I will.”

Linna pursed her lips, turning away, her boots crunching hard across the slivered ice. Bri let out a clouded breath and trembled, watching her go before scurrying up the stairs.

“Did you find them?” Fabien was at the door when she arrived; Bri nodded swiftly.

“They—Well, they wouldn’t take the message down without coin.” She shook the snow from her shoes and moved to the fire.

“Maker!” Lowri said at her side. “So much for Chantry charity. How much did you give them?”

“A silver.” Lowri nodded.

“Trying to get back what they left at the shrine, I bet.”

They were paid five silvers a month—more than most places, but Bri gave an annoyed sigh. The shrine to Andraste in the garden had coins piled at its feet every day, out of the servants' reach.

“I guess that’s another thing Lille owes us,” Lowri added, and curled her lip in a smile. Bri returned it, tight-lipped, before moving back to the bread.

“Donatien came in while you were out,” Lowri said, following her. “He asked about Lille. Fabien told him she was fetching water.”

She laughed again, shrilly. She waved her peeling knife; it glinted in the firelight.

“Fabien lying to Donatien! I mean, _Maker_ , something _must_ be wrong!”

Lowri laughed, then—a shattered sound that died too quickly. After a long moment she turned away, back to the bushel of herbs on the table. She worked with agitated fingers.

“Look, the road got really icy last night,” Lowri said as she picked the leaves from their woody stalks. “Slow going between here and the valley. I’m sure she’s just stuck down there. She’ll be here by the midday meal, I’ll bet. Lucky mare, skipping half a day’s work—and here we are worried sick, making excuses for her!”

Bri simply nodded—she took a long breath. Lowri tore at the herbs while Bri twisted dough around her aching wrists. The day turned like a blackened spit.

Two kitchenhands worked at scrubbing away the accumulated grease that blackened the kitchen walls and made the ceiling creak; another swept away the half-rotted straw across the floor to replace it with fresher, sweeter-smelling sheafs—unending tasks, both.

The boar’s skull from the night before lay on the kitchen worktable, denuded of all its flesh. Gone were its sugar-painted flanks, its tongue and cheeks stripped away and laden with spices for some other dish, its trotters trailing in a tub of boiling water to make Fereldan jellies.

The remains of the cakes from the night before, painstakingly painted by Fabien, were ground up into stale pieces and mixed with offal for the servants’ meals.

When all the trays and orders had been brought to the parts of the castle the servants came for their midday meal; each took their piece of bread and their remains and ate quickly, quietly, before returning to their work.

Her head down, Bri spent hours molding birds out of marzipan until she had a clutch of lifeless creatures to play audience to the Marquise’s morbid meal. She’d hastily mixed a batter for a simple dessert for the keep’s upstairs inhabitants and they baked as she moved on to her finer work, painting each wing with life’s colors, some alert, some bowed. Her fingers were stiff—the black bled into the gold, lines crooked. She fumbled, staring at the same black eyes as the bird in the pantry.

"Get the sponge from the oven," Fabien called out. He was hunched over a bowl, whisking furiously at some half-formed emulsion of butter and eggs. Bri stayed at her table, her fingers kneading mechanically at a lump of marzipan. Fabien repeated himself, his words sharper—Bri heard him from far away.

"Get the—Lille! Lille!" he shouted, an answerless cry.

Lowri had been hoisting a jug of milk to take upstairs but she jumped back as Fabien turned, brandishing his whisk; it slipped from her hands and shattered, frothing white across the stones.

“Look what you’ve done!” Fabien shouted, nearly hopping from one foot to the other as he shrieked. “You’ve ruined it, you stupid _rabbit!_ It’s ruined! _Where is Lille?_ ”

The room went quiet but for the crackle of fire. The milk soaked into the rushes, rank and acidic. All eyes stared.

“Where is Lille?”

He asked again, quieter, his sharp eyes fixed on Lowri. She wrapped her hands in her apron, stepping back from the spilt milk as it seeped between the stones.

“Fuck you,” she mumbled, eyes down. “ _Fuck_ you, flat-ear.”

Lowri turned and, shaking, walked to the hall.

“Come _back_ here!” Fabien yelled, but the door shut behind her unsteady footsteps. Quietly, avoiding his eyes, one of the kitchenhands retrieved the browned lumps of sponge from the depths of the oven and, as if in fearful supplication, left them on the worktable.

Bri held one of her birds in her hands, pinching it too tight between her fingers. Her breath stung in her chest—she took a step towards him.

“Fabien.” Her voice came in a shiver, held tight in her too-taut throat. The scent of burning reached them both.

“What!” He snapped his eyes to hers. She clutched the misshapen marzipan to her chest and moved to stand beside him—then placed a hand on his arm.

“We’ll find her,” she whispered. “We—We can find her, Fabien.”

He pulled away from her touch, turning to grab at the pan he had left too long on the stovetop. It cloyed—the custard steamed and clumped, the bottom crisped to black.

He screamed between gritted teeth.

“Fabien—” Bri began, but he turned to her with red-lined eyes. They held there as the kitchen fire crackled.

“Everything is _burning away_ ,” he said in a shaking, exhaled breath. He dropped the pan of burned custard on the table, curdled egg splashing in the milk, and left into the cold.

Trembling, Bri snatched up a candle from the shelf and followed Lowri; behind her she heard the whispered mutters of the kitchen before the door closed.

“Lowri?” Bri called into the pantry—there was only the distant, disembodied sound of sobs. She called again; this one was answered.

“I’m here,” she said. Bri waited at the threshold for a moment as her eyes, stinging, adjusted to the darkness. Then there was that bright, mineral green as Lowri looked up at her and the shivering candle she held. Bri moved to stand beside her, the candle sliding wax across the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry Fabien yelled,” Bri said. “He’s just—He’s on edge. We all are.”

“Why are _you_ saying _his_ sorries for him?"

“He’s just—He’s just angry. He's worried about Lille.”

“And I’m not? You’re not?” Lowri shouted. Her voice trilled against the vaults of the pantry. “He doesn’t have the right. Not any more than you or me.”

The faint echo quelled as Lowri’s breath misted in the air between them. She looked away.

“I think he’s angry at himself just as much,” Bri said quietly.

“Maybe he deserves it. He’s an arse,” she said. “You don’t have to tiptoe around it. He’s not here. He’s an _arse_. Always making everyone miserable, always yelling, trying to  be ten times worse than Donatien.”

“He’s—“ Bri began, but the words trailed off into the darkness and disappeared.

“And he treats you two times as bad as anyone else,” Lowri said. “I don’t know how you deal with that. And I _heard_ about the guildmaster, but Fabien's not the only elf in the kitchen. He’s got _no right_.”

The light faltered for a moment. Bri looked to the shadowed corners of the room.

“Linna says he’s like one of the Dalish—a _long_ memory for grudges.”

“He’s just worried about Lille,” Bri said, shaking her head.

“He’s worried about _himself_.”

“No—”

Lowri turned away, throwing her hands in the air with a rasping laugh.

“No,” Bri said, more firmly, wringing her hands in her apron. “It’s like—I saw Linna in the courtyard, she asked me about the dress. But I think she’s worried about Lille, too. It's just easier to talk about the dress, isn't it? And Lille brings in the milk every morning. If it spills, it means she’s not there to carry it."

Lowri turned to look at her again. Bri glanced away.

“And—it’s why you don’t want me to go to Donatien. Because if she’s not—If I go to him, it means something _must_ be wrong.”

Lowri shook her head and spat a bitter laugh at the thought. But then she sighed—long, ragged, half a groan of discontent.

“I’d best get back.”

“If you want, I can—”

“No."

She shook her head, and her voice softened at the edges.

"It’s _fine_. I’m _fine_. I'm sure Lille will be here. She’ll be here soon. She wouldn’t miss a meal.”

There was a scuffling noise from the shelf; Lowri nearly jumped.

“A rat!” she cried. Bri shook her head, pointing out the cage on the shelf.

“No—No. The _ortolan_ ,” Bri said, and watched Lowri stare at the finely embroidered cloth. “It’s a songbird, cooked whole.”

Again she peeled back the cloth and brought the candle up to the wire cage; the bird beat at the bars with its tattered wings as it fluttered on its too-small perch. They could see, in the light, its profusion of flesh between the remaining feathers that mottled its skin.

“What did they _do_ to it?” Lowri stared with a grimace.

“Probably just kept it eating,” Bri said.

“Andraste’s tits,” Lowri whispered, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

“Lille would let it go, wouldn’t she?”

Bri didn’t think it could fly anymore. Lowri snorted, one corner of her mouth pushed down in an agitated smile.

“She’d want to _try_ one,” Lowri said. She looked down at the cage. “You know, I worked for an Orlesian family before here, before the war.”

“I thought—“ Bri began, but stopped herself under Lowri’s eyes.

“Thought what?”

“I thought you were from Ferelden. Your accent—”

“I am. The alienage in Highever. But when the Teyrn died, and the Blight—Well, a lot of us moved to Orlais. Most ships weren’t taking elves to the Marches, so, we could only go west.  I was six, I think.”

She drew her knife from her apron, looking at it in the candlelight. She turned it in her hands.

“It was about four years back, the nobleman had a new wife maybe a little too soon after his last had died, maybe a little too young for him too. Well, that was the gossip in the kitchen—one thing we _knew_ was that Madame didn’t like her step-daughter much, and Mademoiselle hated her right back in those little ways Orlesians show their hate."

Lowri sighed again, heavier.

"It went back and forth for a long time. It was just words, first. Talking and not talking. But then things got worse for _us—_ they’d hide jewellery in the servant’s pockets, put pins under the riding saddles, or drop rashvine in the washerwoman’s vats so all the linens would make you _itch_.”

And then she laughed—low and bitter. She ran her thumb along her knife’s edge, blood in her words.

“But then it stopped. See, Mademoiselle kept pigeons—those white ones with the fluffy legs, and a red mark on their fronts that make the Chantry sisters say they’re blessed by Andraste or some rubbish—and they made noise every morning. Madamesaid it drove her mad. So one day Madame had them brought to us in the kitchens and said for us to make a _pie_ from them. We all knew right away they were the Mademoiselle’s but what could we do? I wrung and plucked them as I was told. Heard Mademoiselle’s crying from the other end of the château when she heard what was for dinner. Still ate her supper, though, trying to pretend her father’s wife hadn’t won that battle.”

Lowri kept her gaze on the bird, whose round, black eyes reflected them both.

“That’s how they think of us—hands to wring a neck with. That’s all Fabien wants to be. Full of other peoples’ spite.”

She left her there; the door closed Bri into darkness but for the solitary candle she clutched in her hand. She raised it to the bird’s cage again and stared for a long time at the little creature that was destined to die. The faint scent of vanilla trickled into her memory, then the bitter tang of brandy laced with rotting fruit, of cherries and blood. She covered the cage and left.

She went back to work—Lille’s and her own. Supper was served upstairs, without the _crème Ferelde_ to mask the browned dessert. When the servants came for their own meal, Fabien had still not returned.

They gathered in the hall beside the kitchen, jostling each other as they arranged themselves around the long tables cleared for their meal. There were large pies made from the lungs and throats of sheep, served in inedible cases of pastry in the Fereldan style. Beside this, scraps of the boar centrepiece from the night before, boiled with its bones and trotters until it had turned to thick jellies. The cook ladled out fish stew into bowls made from dry bread, and the kitchen staff brought these to the other servants seated at the long tables. Bri placed them at each setting before chattering servants—men and women from the armoury, the stables, the laundry, all the maids who swept and scrubbed, all the runners who brought messages back and forth—before she joined them at the end of the table where the other kitchen staff quickly sat themselves before their own portions.

The steward—a brusque Antivan man who squinted through a pair of delicate spectacles perched on his nose—conversed for a moment with Donatien, Ser Morris, and a few other high-ranking members of the staff hierarchy before he cleared his throat and raised his hand. The indistinct thrum of the servants’ conversation, which had echoed across the ceiling of the chamber since they had arrived, didn’t die when the steward made the gesture—it only softened it to a scant whisper that made the flames nestled in the table’s squat candles shiver expectantly.

“Last night’s First Day ball progressed with minimal complaints. Notes of gratitude have already begun to arrive on the desk of Lady Montilyet, undoubtedly prepared in advance. Only five pewter goblets, three crystal wine glasses, two porcelain soup tureens, and one gold-plated drinking straw embossed with the insignia of the Comte du Bôite-Buvez were stolen—all were discovered in the quarters of the Comtesse du Bôite-Buvez.

“The Inquisition was victorious last night, as an example of splendour and hospitality. Now we turn to _higher_ pursuits; we must be an example of abstemiousness and piety. Reflect on Andraste’s sacrifices, model yourselves on her restraint. The festivities arranged for you last night resulted in more than one _drunken antic_ involving senior staff.”

Here there was a true hush among the servants, through a mixture of solemn concern and tight-lipped smiles closed over thrumming laughs. The steward paused for a moment, perhaps relishing this rare silence from the underlings.

“The stables were vandalised, the blacksmith scandalised, and the Commander would appreciate the return of his _mattress_.”

At this, laughter. The steward, accustomed to this, always carried a short cane at his side, which he smacked at the edge of the table until silence resumed.

“Now, the words of Andraste.”

The servants’ meal always began with a reading from the Chant, and the Steward, who kept his faith with the zest and passion of all Antivans, always selected the longest refrains. It had taken two months of tense negotiations with the Quartermaster to allow the servants to begin their meal after the first stanza, the Maker’s Prayer, and not after the entire verse had finished. The servants looked up at him with terse stares; Bri watched as he cleared his throat and flourished his hands, his head tilted to the ceiling and his eyes closed as though Andraste Herself reminded him of the words.

“ _O Maker, hear my cry_ ,” he began. The words were familiar to all; their whispers turned to this one purpose as they repeated the verse alongside him.

“ _Guide me through the blackest nights_

_Steel my heart against the temptations of the wicked_

_Make me to rest in the warmest places_.”

The momentary harmony was abandoned; the meal began with a clatter. Each servant had their own cup and bowl—rough wooden things with initials or, more often, simple symbols carved into the sides to mark them for those who couldn’t read—and immediately the servants piled their suppers into them. The steward raised his voice to sing the rest of the chosen Chant but it could not compete with the cruder words flung across the tables.

_O Creator, see me kneel:_

_For I walk only where You would bid me_

_Stand only in places You have blessed_

_Sing only the words You place in my throat_

The cook, who had stood behind the steward in silence, now joined them and, when she had found room at the trencher by shoving two kitchenhands aside until the whole bench was as tightly packed as a barrel of fish,  she was instantly handed her stern-faced baby by one of the launderers—a elf woman whose domain of knotted linens and steaming vats of laundry had always acted as a sort of creche for the servants’ brood. Now the cook attached the babe to her breast and, chewing up tough pieces of offal for her child, occasionally pulled back to add some meat among the milk.

_My Maker, know my heart_

_Take from me a life of sorrow_

_Lift me from a world of pain_

_Judge me worthy of Your endless pride_

Bri caught snippets of conversation as she sat with her head bent over her watery stew. There were whispers that the Marquise they were hosting ate nothing but oysters on ice, or little curls of snail laid in nests of watercress, or any other of the thousands of other finicky Orlesian dishes that were nothing but mouthfuls of flavour that took seconds to eat but hours, or days, to prepare. The launderers complained that the Marquise insisted on sleeping on silk sheets dusted with rose petals, which stained terribly and had to be washed twice a day lest the Marquise see the unsightly marks. Even the maids said that the Marquise powdered her gloves and the soles of her shoes with gold dust that trailed on the ground when she walked and left glittery hand-prints everywhere she touched, which was everything, apparently, as they found marks in the oddest of places around Skyhold, including the seat of a shamefaced stableboy’s trousers. This, alongside the bowl of fresh cream she required for her morning and afternoon toilettes, the dried elfroot she requested by the bushel for her stinking Rivani smoking device, and the Antivan port she fed to her prized mare—the Marquise menaced the whole of Skyhold’s downstairs. The bird fluttered in its cage behind the pantry door.

_My Creator, judge me whole:_

_Find me well within Your grace_

The conversation turned to the night before; who had danced with whom, who had eaten most, drank most, whose smallclothes were found by the woodpile.

“Where’s Lille? I haven’t seen her all day.”

The question quieted the hall for a moment.

“Have you checked the hayloft?” It was a voice down at the other end of the table—a ripple of laughter reached Bri’s ears alongside the words.

_Tell me I have sung to Your approval_

“I saw her last night just before she went down. She was already _quite_ merry.”

“She has the dress, I heard.” Fereldan, a woman from the stables.

“Oh yes, she was wearing it _very_ well.” An Orlesian accent—maybe from the armoury?

“I saw her dancing with Abelard.” Another Fereldan, from the brewhouse.

_O Maker, hear my cry_

“I don’t know what she likes about that lucky son of a bitch.” Definitely Orlesian—no Fereldan would use _that_ word as an insult.

“I wonder what the flat-ear will do?” An elf, a footman, whispering to someone beside him. Bri looked up; Linna was to his left, smiling bitterly.

_Seat me by Your side in death_

“Nothing, I’ll bet. Bastard's in love with her."

The footman laughed. Linna caught Bri’s eyes—Bri looked back down to the chunks of white fish swimming in her bowl.

"You think?"

"I _know_."

"I don’t see him, either—where is he?”

_Make me one within Your glory_

“Probably too ashamed to show his face. Did you hear about the guildsman?”

“And that kitten he was taking care of is dead, too.”

Someone dropped their cup at the other end of the table—Bri didn't catch the next words.

_And let the world once more see Your favor_

"—trying to feed that runty kitten the cat didn't want. It died a few nights ago."

"What was he doing that fool thing for?"

_For You are the fire at the heart of the world_

"Who knows. I caught him one night and he jumped like a rabbit in a snare."

And then laughter—laugher that echoed along the stone vaults of the room, that drowned the Chant and lingered too long after, at all the pieces of himself that Fabien had tried to hide away.The meal churned on. Gossip lapped at their tongues. The kitchen cleared the table as the other staff moved back to the rest of their unending work.

Bri was stacking bowls for the scullery when there was a touch at her shoulder and a voice in her ear.

“Briony.”

It was Donatien. Bri felt her viscera twist into a hard knot as she turned to look at him. She clutched the bowls in her hands.

“Messere?” She kept her voice steady.

“Where are Fabien and Lille?”

She nodded at the question, glancing away from his hard eyes for a moment before turning back.

“Fabien is—Fabien went to eat alone. Lille—"

She saw Lowri from the corner of the room, lingering as she passed from the kitchen to the pantry. Her eyes were cold. Bri looked back to Donatien and shook her head with a harsh jerk.

"I don’t know where Lille is. No one has seen her all day. We sent a message to the servants in the valley but we haven’t heard back—I don't know if it reached her, or if—I don't know.” Her voice quickened as she spoke. He put a hand on her shoulder and she went still.

“Finish your work.”

He said this only, then left her in he emptied hall. Bri watched him walk away, then took a few short steps back towards the scullery before Lowri came to her side.

“Why did you _do_ that?” Lowri glared up at her, her hand at the waist of her apron.

“I had to,” Bri said in a breathless gasp. She backed away; Lowri came closer.

“Lille will be in _trouble_ now!”

“Lille _is_ in trouble!”

“Stop it!” Lowri yowled. “You don’t know—You don’t know her! Stop it!”

She jabbed at Bri’s shoulder, pushing her back against the wall as Bri clutched the dirtied bowls to her chest and winced.

“You weren’t with her, you were _never_ with her. You stayed in the kitchen and _hid_ like you always do.” She slapped her palm against the stone beside Bri’s ear. “You don’t _know_ her!”

Sharply she turned and bolted away, leaving the echo of her words in Bri’s chest as she pulled breath into her body. She bit her tongue to hold the hollow sounds inside her.

Bri crumpled to the floor, the bowls clattering beside her. The stones were cold, slick with trodden snow turned back to water. Her limbs were numb—she stared at the palms of her hands, scarred and useless.

Shakily, she stood again, collected the dirty things, and pulled herself back into the kitchen.

She worked until her body begged; her wrists ached at every twist of dough, her back strained to keep her upright, the balls of her feet sore from standing for hours. She heard, saw, moved, brought each moment of the day to bear on her fingertips and elbows as she kneaded and tore. It shifted beneath her hands, her thoughts falling like flakes of ice.

The kitchen went quiet. Bri looked up—the room shivered—she blinked and it was right again.

Fabien was at the door; in one hand he held the bird’s covered cage. He dropped it heavily on the tabletop; they heard the susurrus of feathers flutter within. The firelight lined his thin body as he crouched over the cage.

“Well someone just has to wring its neck, right?” One of the kitchenhands spoke into the empty air. Fabien shook his head.

“No,” he said. “It has to be drowned.”

“ _Drowned?_ ”

“In brandy."

“ _Brandy?”_

He silenced the echo with a glance, all the narrow points of his face sharpened by the shadows. The cage drew all their eyes—snatched up in the snare of its promise. One of the kitchenhands brought a wide-necked bottle filled with brandy and stood it beside the cage. The liquid glowed warmly, the method of its martyrdom.

Lowri stood by the wall, watching in silence. The two kitchenhands, avoiding Fabien’s eyes, busied themselves with other tasks—sweeping, scrubbing, moving a sack of flour across the room and back again. Bri saw Lowri take one shaking step towards the bird but then she looked away.

"Briony."

Their eyes met. His face was drawn, thin in the dark of the kitchen. She shook her head and didn’t speak a word.

“ _Briony_.”

She took a step towards the cage; her joints ached, her neck stiff as she kept her eyes on the cage stripped of its covering. The cage door was held shut with a twist of thin wire; she moved to kneel but fell heavily to her knee, reaching for the latch and fumbling with it between unsteady fingers. Fabien made a noise of disgust.

“Give it to me.”

Bri stepped back before he could push her aside. He pried open the door; the bird squatted on its perch, its dull, patchy feathers spread out as it raised its too-small wings in fright. It shrieked, staring. Lowri stepped closer, watching, her arms crossed tightly over her chest; her smile was thin and bitter as Fabien jammed his hand into the bird’s cage.

It fought; it dragged its sharp beak against his palm and bit when he finally caught it. One of its wings bent and snapped beneath his grasping fingers, its legs churning. He shoved it down into the glass, gritting his teeth, gripping the neck of the bottle with his other hand. It thrashed as he held it under the bubbling brandy, its mouth pried open by the sound of its own churning squeal.

It went still. Quiet, lips parted as though words had left him, he drew it from the brandy bottle. A pair of dull feathers sank to the bottom of the glass. Splayed in his palm, he stared at dead thing for a long moment. A log shifted in the fire, cracking like a switch—he looked up with a start and gasped a held breath.

He threw it on the table, hands shaking—limp and bloated, black eyes staring, its feathers slick against its swollen body. One of the kitchenhand stepped forward and began plucking the drowned thing of its little feathers, their eyes locked onto their task.

Acrid drops of brandy dripped from Fabien's fingers, mingled with a scratch of blood that leaked from his palm where the bird had bit him. He turned, his shoulders quivering, and wrapped the offending hand in a stretch of cloth.

The door pried open just as the plucked bird was thrown into the pan.

“They found her—they found her!"

It was the scullery maid—she panted at the door, stringy hair covering her face. Lowri jumped up to follow, and Bri took shaking steps behind her. Fabien pushed past the girl and darted down the slick steps, disappearing into the dark. Quietly, Bri followed the bob of the girl’s lamp as they descended to the castle gate. Beyond, unseen, the low laugh of ravens echoed across the courtyard as the three of them crossed the matted snow.

There were others there, and the press of voices; the lamp lit the backs of onlookers as they pushed through the crowd. Bri saw Fabien by the gate, a torch clutched in his raw and trembling hand, knuckles bitten by the shrieking cold. The cart rattled against the flagstones of the gatehouse. It edged into the sphere of withered light; the wooden boards, the draped canvas coiled over with rough cord, the flash of a silver dress, a white and bloodless elbow. Bri felt pain, wild, firm, stabbing at her chest and throat.

“Lille—Lille!”

An answerless cry.


	8. Chapter 8

It took two days to gather the wood for her pyre. Dry kindling was scarce but the servants offered up whatever burned in their braziers; they wouldn’t mind the cold.

The Chantry sisters had washed the blood from her body when it had thawed. They had combed out her long, dark hair. They had clothed her corpse in a plain, funereal white; a launderer, scrubbing at the torn and bloodied silver, noted the dress's ruin with a bitter remark which was instantly silenced.

Two days and she lay beneath the statue of Andraste, waiting for the fire that would take her to the Maker’s side.

Parts of the castle went into mourning. Her apron hung on the wall—stirred when a door opened, or when a draught dredged the fire—an unmarked white against the stones. Some touched it as they passed, then brought their fingertips to their lips in a quick and quiet prayer between their tasks. All of them tore strips of cloth from old, black rags and tied them around an upper arm, or a wrist, or an elbow. Soon they were stained with thin coverings of white flour, yellow grease, blood—no one dared remove them. A scullery maid had picked at a frayed edge until Lowri’s sharp, red eyes made her stop; they were eyes continuously filled with tears, shining with anger, keeping watch.

It was two days and a pot of sugar Lille had ground down three days before rested like an urn on the shelf.

Across Skyhold the servants went back to their work with a grudging incredulity, as if everything that the lights, the spitted lambs, the dancing, the bonfires, and the new year had promised would never come to pass. The ovens still had to be lit. The day’s bread still had to be baked. Bri knelt on her ashen knees and sparked the fires that would burn up all her frightening thoughts—that would burn up all the aches that had sunk into her bones. Carelessly she brushed her knuckles against the hearthstone and her skin blistered and wept. The thin flesh around Bri’s fingernails peeled back, red bruises mottled her palms, and the heels of her hands dried and cracked until she was kneading blood into the dough.

It was two days and all the hours had passed in an indistinct succession. Lowri carried the milk up the steps with an exacting slowness, careful of each movement, careful of her hands that throttled the neck of the jug with a white-knuckled intensity. Two days and Fabien stood in the kitchen with his back bent, as if all the life had been drawn from him, as if he had pulled a bloodied knife from his own belly so that he might, deathlessly, begin pitting fruit with it. When Bri tipped the bowl of salt with her elbow she spent long, painful minutes catching each glittering grain and placing it back into its dish. It was two days and the whispers of the kitchen stuffed the castle with gossip until it was tender and swollen like a goose's liver.

In the lower courtyard the merchants were setting up their stalls. The wagons that wreathed through the mountain passes rolled across the grit and packed snow and trundled through Skyhold’s gates, unburdening themselves.The tent with a host of swaying sheep’s carcasses shivered with each fall of the cleaver on the butcher’s block, the man in the bloodied apron scraping meat from ribs and shoulders and throwing the bones to a fat dog at his side. Pilgrims, servants, and tradesmen milled in the courtyard and trampled the snow into sharp, muddied ice. All that remained of First Day was a smear of stubborn paint, a suggestion of blurred edges that still marred the barn's wooden wall.

The crunch of the half-frozen slicks of snow beneath Bri’s quick, careful steps made her stomach turn, but the kitchen’s heavy heat and walls shining with unscrubbed grease and whispered words made her slip away for a moment’s breath in the last of the daylight. She didn’t listen to the gossip; it turned into formless sounds that floated in the air, distracting her as they crept into her chest. Now the cold withered her lungs and the water-carrier’s wooden yoke bit into the back of her neck as she hoisted the sloshing buckets up. The butcher’s knife fell against the block as the dog dug greedily into the frozen marrowfat. Bri’s jaw clenched tight at the sight.

Lowri was in the courtyard, sitting by the stable on an upturned bucket and huddling over a headless chicken. She was tearing at it—there were patches of slick skinless meat across the bird’s half-plucked carcass. The blackened brazier beside her was empty.

Abelard—the one who threatened with a kiss, Bri remembered—stood over her with a tin of milk sunk in the snow between his feet. His cart, filled with the day’s empty tins, stood by the portcullis. Lowri glanced up at him between frantic tugs at the bird’s stiff feathers.

“Nothing at all?” Lowri said.

“She slipped away. I don’t know. Disappeared.”

“I heard they found her by the mill.”

“Yeah, that’s right?” He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, staring down at Lowri with a gritted frown. “Why?”

“You were _with_ her,” Lowri said, her voice thin and breathless. She clutched the dead bird to her chest. “Just tell me what _happened_.”

“I don’t remember,” he said again, and pressed each word flat with a punch of his tongue. “Can’t you _hear_ me with those huge ears?”

Lowri answered through bared teeth.

“Fuck you, _shemlen_ ,” she spat. “Lille always said it was just the drink but you’re still an arsehole. Maker knows why she hung around with you.”

Even from where she stood, Bri could see his sunken eyes narrow as he met Lowri’s gaze. His blue-tipped fingers clenched into fists; he released them in a withering breath.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said again, slowly. “Cerys doesn’t remember either. She was just gone. Don’t you think I want to remember? Don’t you think I want her alive, too?”

She bent her head over her task, fumbling with the bird’s limp claws. He crouched down beside her, his hands wrapped around the neck of the milk tin. His words came in a low hiss.

“So maybe you should watch what you’re saying, knife-ear. You could stand to be sweeter.”

Lowri looked up at him now, one hand moving to the fold in her apron where she kept her kitchen knife. Abelard glanced to her grubby fingers and his throat bobbed in a dark, low laugh.

“Maybe you should eat some _sugar_.”

All the color in her cheeks fled in this moment, as if she too hung in the butcher's stall where the heavier knife still fell rhythmically against the block. Abelard's smile deepened like a fresh cut as he rose with his tin of milk and walked back to the porticullis, the ice cracking beneath his overshoes. Lowri's eyes stayed on him until he reached his wagon; with a hard twist of her spine she turned sharply to where Bri stood—she nearly jumped at the sudden sight.

“What do _you_ want?”

It was more alarm than anger.

“Nothing,” Bri breathed, cold water sinking into her stockings. Lowri nodded, her breath clouding the air in swift bursts as she tried to still her shivering.

“That’s right,” Lowri said, and turned back to the half-plucked bird. Bri let the yoke slip from her shoulders and walked to where Lowri sat, sinking into the snow and making each step unbalanced as she struggled to keep her footing. When she stood before her, Lowri glanced up and pinched the bird’s flesh between raw fingertips.

“You should be inside,” Bri said. “It’s warmer and—we need more hands. Fabien and me—we need more hands.”

Lowri's eyes went back to her work, exposing more and more skinned meat to the cold as her fingers moved over the carcass. Her voice shook bitterly as she spoke, as though stuttering with the beat of her heart.

“So now you’re Fabien, and I’m Lille?”

Bri swallowed back Lowri’s bile, twisting her apron in her hands.

“No, I—I’m just telling you that you can go inside." The kitchen cat had long moved her living brood into the castle, and even the horses wore blankets in their stalls. Bri nodded to the feathers, which drifted lightly over the snow, stuck in drifts, and whorled around the boots and skirts' hems that moved across the courtyard. 

“You don’t have to do this,” she offered.

“Well someone _fucking_ has to!” Lowri twisted the bird’s wings in her hands, standing sharply. “I’m not doing two lots of work, bloody _shem_! Do it yourself!”

For a moment Bri felt the press of Lille’s fingers on her wrist; she shook her head.

“That’s not—I—” Bri began, but stuttered into silence as Lowri sat again, letting the bird lie limp in her lap. “I’m sorry.”

Lowri stared at her hands as the tears slid impassively down her cheeks in straight, shining lines to join the trampled snow. She ignored them, even as her running nose frosted in the air, even as her red-tipped fingers clenched and unclenched fitfully.

“So what? What will anyone’s sorries do? Lille is _dead_.”

She went back to her methodical work; one by one the bird's long wingfeathers cluttered at her feet, twirling as they fell. Bri took hard breaths that clenched at her throat, even as she knelt in the snow before Lowri to better hear her whispering.

“You could’ve—There wasn’t—She could have been in _trouble_ ,” Lowri said, her voice breaking as she spoke. The cold crept along Bri’s skin, her hands wound up in her apron to hide the cracks.

“What else—What else could we have done?”

Lowri frowned, crushing one of the chicken’s scaly legs in a fist as her brow creased and she leaned back in her seat, the snow crunching beneath the upturned bucket’s shifting rim.

“Nothing,” she spat. Her tears were frost-tipped on her copper lashes. She looked away for a moment. “Someone has to write to her brother.”

Bri found Lowri’s eyes on her again as she said this—Bri looked away, embarrassed, her lips trembling.

“Brother? She has—”

“ _Had_.” The word fell like a knife on the butcher’s block. “Lille’s got nothing now. Nothing but the Maker. She’s left _everything_ behind.”

Bri’s stared for a moment as Lowri gave a short, barked laugh. Beyond, the dog received another tossed strip of gristle.

“You didn’t even _know_ her,” Lowri said, head bent, as she ripped out another fistful of feathers. “Maker, it’s like you just want to _forget_.”

Stiffly Bri stood, her hands limp at her sides as Lowri, small and trembling, stared with drawn and yellowed eyes as if she demanded Bri present her hands for the switch.

"I—I—" Bri stuttered, lips numb in the cold. There was nothing left for her to say. There was nothing inside her. Under Lowri’s sharp gaze she stumbled back to where the yoke and its buckets of water lay beside the well. She felt the breath pressed from her body as she rose with the familiar weight that would put her pointless pain to use.

In the kitchen the water was poured with the rest that hissed and spat above a tended fire. Bri stood beside Fabien; he handled each misshapen piece of dough they had made that day, turning them in his expert hands until they swelled, round and perfect, as if nothing could ever come to harm him so long as he remained, so long as he continued so unfeelingly. Bri followed him, cracking eggs against the tabletop to pluck out their yellow hearts. She said nothing—even as her fingers trembled unaccountably, even as she could only still them by bracing her elbows on the table. Her bloodless lips shivered with the cold that remained inside her.

“Look.”

A kitchenmaid stared from the other side of the room; she gave this whispered alarm to a serving boy beside her. Bri looked down at the eggs she had been absently breaking. A cracked egg pooled in her palm, the white filled with blood, the yolk threaded with black veins; it stained her fingers a deep red. A coiled piece of unformed flesh, dark and lifeless, lay within the yolk. Dark spots stained the floured countertop.

There was a lull in the workday’s noises—the succession of knives slowed, the clatter of pans and whispers quieted. But it was only for a moment. The kitchen resumed its work with the knowledge that the omen was two days late. Bri washed her hands of it and went back to work.

 

It was two days before Lille’s body was burned in accordance with Chantry rites. The servants descended to the valley to watch her pyre burn. The heavy smoke that poured out became bright, became jubilant, as it coiled up into the darkening sky above. The firelight grew and she danced in every cinder; cloudless, the sky accepted her, staining each wisp of black a shining, fathomless gold.

Or perhaps it was just another kitchen fire, baking the same bitter bread as it always did—it was impossible for Bri to know, watching alone from the battlements in the fading evening light. The wind scattered the smoke across the mountaintops and it disappeared from sight.

It was two days and Bri had not slept in that time. Her bed seemed narrower and narrower each time she lay in it. The bedclothes were cold and heavy in the night, like sheet wreathed with coiling rope, like a carcass laid out on the butcher’s block, puckered and white.

With a breath that misted in the dead air, Bri rose to pull her clothes back over her body. The faint, filtered light of the moon seeped through the windowpanes and lay like spilt milk across the floor. Faintly she heard the others in their cots—snoring, breathing, shifting on their flat, straw-filled mattresses as the hours wore on. Bri turned away and walked out into the night.

Light snow fell, brushing past her bloodless cheeks, catching in her hair as she found the path to the kitchen. There were a few scattered torches that had not yet been doused; she avoided their light. She turned a corner, passed beneath an arch, and nearly collided with a soldier pacing the battlements in his nightly rotation. Bri clutched her hands to her chest, staring up at him—he looked at her, held a hot and flickering torch up to her face—she squinted, turning away, shaking under his eyes as the firelight pinned her in place.

He left her, indifferent, resuming his walk across the castle walls. Bri let out a held breath, warming her dry lips for a moment before the cold snatched even this away from her. She found her steps again.

If he had forced her to speak she did not know what she would have said. Words had left her, as they must.

The Chantry garden opened up before her. The trees’ bare branches reached up to the cloudless sky in supplication, trembling—she heard them clack against one another. Only this and the faint brush of her skirts against the snow; the rest was an implacable silence that filled up all her hollow spaces. She left tracks across the covered paths until she fell to stillness. The snow glittered, bright and indistinct, before her; the sky, filled with stars, did the same. She could not tell one from the other. Her cheeks were wet, but it was only the snow that fell and melted against what little warmth was still in her skin.

She was blinded by darkness and light. The air stung her lungs as she breathed. The edges of her vision blurred. Her hands went numb, sunk into the snow. Black smoke filled her eyes and dragged with it the night. She would be swallowed whole.

Then she felt something brush against her bare arm. She nearly didn’t notice it, but it did not turn back into water against her skin—it was more firm, more real, than the confusion of snow and sky around her. No one had touched her in days—she had nearly forgotten the sensation but for the bruise that had bloomed on her shoulder where Lowri had shoved her. Her eyes, as accustomed to the darkness as they could ever be, could make the faint shape of a boy before her, shivering, long strands of hair in front of his eyes.

“Cole—Cole?” she called, her voice a breathless wisp in the cold.

“Bri.”

His answer in the dark. As soon as the sound passed his lips she felt his hands in hers. He was warm—so warm. She shivered from it.

“Where—“ she began, but her voice trailed and fell amongst the endless questions she could have asked, each without an answer he could give. He said her name again, and she bowed her head. He brought a hand to her chin and her eyes were raised again to his as they had on another snowy evening.

“Spilled the salt, dead by dawn," he said. She held her breath. Each word was spoken by rote—in a higher, more lilting voice than his own. Then he looked away, shaking his head. "But it was sugar—it was sugar. It should never have worked.”

Her breath left her, her blood ringing shrilly in her ears. She felt stuck and scoured by the cold. The grains of sugar had ground between their palms when Lille had stooped to kiss her.

Bri only nodded absently at the memory, the motion taut and shuddering, her chest tight. She was cold, so cold—he brought her to stand before him. She trembled violently; he stilled her with an embrace.

“Let me help,” he said, holding her stiffly. There was no more moonlight, all was dark.

“It never should have worked," she repeated in a long breath against his chest.

The trees shuddered together at a wind that stirred the hem of her ragged shawl.

“It—“ she began again, but the sound condensed, hardened into ice, and stuck in her throat. She could not experience this moment. Memory coiled up like smoke in her mind, but—Cole shone there, burning alone—so quiet—so careful—so kind. He lead her away, by the hand, from this cold and lonely spot she had chosen for herself. Together they passed through the snow to the cloister hall, then through one of the heavy doors into the darkness of the room beyond.

Briefly he let go of her to grasp at the last still-flickering candle that sat at the statue's base alongside a dozen dead ones. He brought flame to their wicks one by one; now he lit candles for her against the dark. Each one made the statue of Andraste flame before them; they were candles that filled the room with shadows, candles that fatted themselves on darkness. But his eyes were clouded with light, it seemed—his eyes were the only points of light.

The stone face of the Maker’s bride stared impassively over her children.

“It echoes,” he said into the still air. There was no sound but his voice, pouring into her ear. “Long and dark in a dress that flashes like a knife, grains of sugar grinding between pressed palms, lips laid against layers she can’t peel away—too far—too deep—You shouldn’t listen.”

He put his palm to her cheek and she breathed. His fingertips slid down the thin expanse of her throat and she was aware of how weak and quivering her heart was beneath her breast. Feeling came back into her limbs as he touched her. She shifted away, and his hand fell back to his side. He looked to her, lips parted. Under the brim of his hat were a pair of eyes the colour of icy water; beneath a thin sheet of frost was the capacity for drowning.

“I’ve felt all kinds of pain,” he said. “Pain tells me what’s needed. Pain tells me how to help. It whispers what it wants. It echoes inside.”

“I don’t want—anything,” Bri said, and shivered. “There’s nothing.”

She sighed a heavy held breath. Now he stared at her.

“You want to forget,” he said. He looked into her eyes, looked past them, made everything bleed again.

“But how—How am I meant to remember her?” Bri asked.

He dropped his eyes and wrung his hands, and for a moment he seemed as small and helpless as the rabbits they had put in the earth. Then he met her eyes again.

“Yes, like the rabbits. We’re the only ones who know where they are. We’re the only ones who remember them. We can’t forget—or else they might not have existed at all.”

She shook her head.

“Is that so awful?”

“Yes.”

She looked to him; now his face was all in shadow. She did not deserve this moment. She did not deserve this feeling—of sadness that threatened to swallow her whole.

“Everyone wants,” he said in a whisper. “It's not about deserving. Fabien would have climbed onto the pyre but he couldn’t bear to see her body burn. And you put her death on the shelf, like she did, grinding sugar in secret. But it’s lost all its sweetness now. You shouldn’t put it to your lips, like she wanted to. You wouldn’t like how it tastes. You wouldn’t—“

He stopped himself short and, with a graceless bow of his head, his back bending awkwardly, he leaned down and pressed his lips against her cheek.

She stepped away with the warm impression against her skin—she put her palm over it, to hold it there, to hide it. His eyes were bright beneath the strands of straw-colored hair.

“When Lille did it, it was like a sigh—like honey on the tongue,” he whispered. Her eyelashes fluttered as she turned away, suddenly shy. “It was like that when—you did it to me. I wanted to give that to you, too."

She felt his hands on her shoulders, staring wide-eyed at Cole who watched with that quiet intensity that sharpened all the lines of his face. How shehad leaned to her and laid her lips on her cheek—laughing, wet, the warm press of her. Bri closed her eyes on the memory as she stepped away from Cole’s touch.

“You’re teasing me,” Bri said with a sigh, as though this could explain everything he knew. She picked at a crust of dried blood on her palm absently until it bled again. “She teases me, too.”

Bri looked down at her hands, limp and scarred; how broken they looked when she stood with her back bent. She remembered how Lille always scrubbed beneath her fingernails. How Lille would touch each piece of dough lightly, gently, before plunging her hands into it with a laugh. The red marks of the switch. The criss-cross of cuts on white palms.

“Lowri said—Lowri said I never knew her. I thought I did. Or—I knew I couldn’t. How can anyone know someone else?” Her eyes rose to his. “It’s like you know everything about me, and I don’t know how.”

He nodded, only. She looked away, coiling her hands once again in her skirt’s flour-streaked folds. She never knew her. Like a curl of cream on a cake. Like a piece of pastry too pretty to eat. But eating is half of what makes it pretty—she never knew her. They came close but never touched. Her knees shook with the weight of her and she moved to sit, back against the cold stone.

Cole reached out and grasped her hands in his. He shifted to sit before her, his limbs bending awkwardly as if he could make himself as small as she. She pressed back the knot in her throat, pulled the words from her.

“She made herself sweet on purpose. For all of us. She wanted everyone to see it. She wanted everyone to like her, and they did. I tried—I wanted it. I wanted it so much. But I couldn’t do everything she asked.” She would have put a hand to her mouth, to stop herself, but he twined their fingers together and would not let her.

“She asked you with her eyes. She wanted but waited.” Here he laughed, a soft breath. “And she _never_ waited.”

For a moment Bri gave a thin, gentle smile.

“No,” she said, “no, never. She would tell me stories, too. Like you do. Like I—tried. She would tell me the servants in the valley, their names, what they did. She tried—She tried so hard to bring me with her. But I never went.”

Cole’s hands were rough, just like Lille’s. She saw her there; she took her by the hand and would lead her down some path that neither knew. Palms red, bright like a careless stain of cherries.

“Last summer she threw herself into the river just to see if the soldier she liked would come and rescue her.”

Her words came quickly, trembling as they crowded her throat, threaded with laughter. She would never know why she had done that, now.

“He did—but he was so angry. She just laughed. Laughed at him jumping after her. Laughed at the thought of her dying like that. She could laugh—she laughed all the time. Do you think she would laugh at this—do you think she would laugh at how everyone is acting, now that she’s gone? That we won’t touch a pot of sugar, that the smell of vanilla makes everyone sad? How Fabien won’t even speak—what she always wanted!—would she laugh? Would she find that funny, too?”

Lille’s laughter bubbled deliciously in her mind, like a panful of fat on the fryer. Bri smiled and put a hand to her mouth, as if to hide the sight of such an indulgence. She swallowed back the smile. She swallowed back the laughter.

“She lived by forgetting,” he said. “Every moment was washed clean of the one before. It was very hard. She did it so the sadness could not find her. But it did. So she had to keep moving, again and again. Each time she was a little bit further away—each time it followed her. But you can’t forget. There is blood and flour, milk and memory. You knead it all into the day’s dough. Even if you don’t think about it, it’s there in your hands.”

The dry, cracked skin along her knuckles throbbed when he touched her. Shame—she tried to pull them away, hide them again in her apron, but he turned her palms under his eyes.

“She fed you all the things you couldn’t have,” he said, and looked to her with a sudden intensity. “And you were so _hungry_.”

Her eyes stung with the cold. She felt it at the corners. Felt everything tangle as he spoke. She would have turned away but all she could feel, now, was his hands—she thought she could slip away into nothing if she let him go.

“She made you feel whole,” he said, full of wonder. “She made you feel real. Like—more—than just a pair—of hands.”

He ran the pad of his thumb down each of her fingers, as though he sought her in their scars and creases, as if he could see himself in her burns. She could not help but tremble as he touched each part of all that she was—her wrists ached under his eyes.

She was so cold—she was suddenly aware of only this, the chill that hadn’t left her since he had brought her here. Carefully, as if he handled some delicate confection, Cole brought her hands to his lips and warmed her bruised fingers with lungfuls of his breath. She watched him as he shared this with her. The bends of her nails were a dull, bloody blue—from cold and bruising as she dug her fingertips into frozen dough. Then he took up one of her hands and placed her palm to his cheek. He leaned into her touch, watching with quick, tentative eyes. The numbness in her fingertips ebbed away as the warmth rose back up inside her. No one had touched her so tenderly in years; but the scratches, the dead skin, the bruises that lined her wrists like old blood remained. She was frightened. She clung to him. She could not be brought back to life with a breath.

It was two days and the heart that had spasmed around Lille’s death opened wide.

“I—I—”

Her words faltered—they must. She had none left. She had said them all.

“It’s all right,” Cole said softly. “You can stay here. You don't have to go away.”

“I—I—“ she said, trying again. But there was nothing but that one shuddering sound that rattled in her throat, empty of all else.

Then she wept. She wept like a wound that had only just begun to bleed. She cradled his sweet face in her hands and came close; she pressed her brow to his and let the tears slide down her face and fall on his chest, shuddering with each heavy breath she took between her low cries that came up from the centre of her self. He held her laid his cheek on the crown of her head and held her as she shivered. The tears choked her, blinded her, made every inch of her insensate and numb.

Her heartbeat would tell him all her secrets. The blood in her cheeks was a language he could read. The silence ached but she heard, distantly, his own heart, his own breath—she felt his hands as they held her. How he looked at her and saw her, fully, truly—how he demanded nothing, took nothing from her. Only gave, unthinkingly gave to her everything he could.

He was a candle burning a low, clear flame, the only light and color in the dark that closed close as a cupboard, that shut itself tight in the darkness of the kitchen. She shielded it with her whole body. When he moved as if to slide away, that quiet way he shifted into darkness and became nothing, she held him to her and he stayed.

Soon the room was still. She was used to heavy breath, a somnambulant rustle among the bedclothes, a murmur, a snore. Silence was rare; his slow breath was silent. She watched the candles, hollowed out by fire, glowing deep within their tallow casements. Such desperate prayers. He touched every inch of her. She felt his heartbeat against her chest; she listened to her heart, beat after beat, until she was filled with the sound. Each one like steps, like knocks, that continued on and on despite her. And she could feel his just beside her own, weak, slow, but unmistakable. They were here together, empty space and shadows against the fasting light.

She woke, once, while the night still hung heavily over them. The statue, which had taken on a layer of frost in the damp room, now stood weeping as the ice melted away in the firelight. Cole clung, still and silent—asleep. The moon grazed the window glass, made diamond patterns on his back. They shifted, rising and falling with his breath. His hair was like lint, light and fair, on his brow. He was silvered in the light. Her back ached. Her shoulder, where he laid his cheek, was sore. Warm points of contact that ached as she breathed beside him.

She passed delicate fingertips over his cheekbone, pushing aside the slicks of untidy blonde hair that always seemed to hang in front of his eyes. His eyelids twitched, a flutter of lashes fine as spun sugar against skin sallowed in the low light. She raised herself to kiss the crown of his head; that same scent of sweet sweat came to her as she pressed her lips to him. She urged her fluttering heart to quiet. Consciously, carefully, she slipped back into a sleep as still and placid as his own.

 

The morning light glared in her eyes and lit the tears on her cheeks.

She woke in a chill sweat, not even an impression of warmth left on her skin from where he had so desperately held her. Even the paving stones were cold, the memory of him lost. The candles had all drowned in their wax. The statue of Andraste threw long shadows against the far wall as the dawn broke.

She was alone. He had left her.

But she remembered; it was there, fleeting, ghosting against her skin, running its fingers up her spine, a breath against her neck, a flutter of eyelashes against her collarbone. Her bones clacked as she rose. The stones would forget them both just as quickly. Then it would be gone, nothing again but the chill air of winter.

She was overwhelmed for a moment with the knowledge that only she and he would remember the night before. Bri stood in the centre of the room that had changed so drastically by the light. Andraste was a silhouette against the lightening windows. Bri had overslept.

She stared at the wasted candles. They'd be lit again for supplicants kneeling before the statue. They'd be lit for other wishes and wants. There would be no notice, no thought—her tears would circle the ceiling with all the other prayers uttered in this room, lost in their equal weight, lost in their equal solidity like the white smoke of incense around a sputtering pyre.

Bri reached out and gripped one of the candles, wrenching it from its stuck circle of hardened wax. Standing, she didn’t know what to do with it—didn’t know how to make anything remember her. She bent and placed it on an untouched section of the stone floor. A small thing to keep the moment from slipping away—to make it remember.

Bri slipped back into the shadow of the cloister and made her way to the battlements. The brief snowfall from the night before had done little to obscure the day’s movements. Two guards were already hoisting the portcullis for a handful of pilgrims coming for the morning Chant. Bri quickly gathered herself up, scrubbing her sleep-lined face with a corner of her cloak as she scurried back to the kitchen where she belonged.

When she reached the door she saw that it was unlatched, open; she pushed it and it squealed on its hinges. There was a scent of smoke when she entered; Fabien was not there, but he had lit the ovens, and there were already two dozen bread loaves cooling on shelves set against the wall. He had not slept at all since Lille had risen to the sky.

Bri brought her apron down and tied it around her waist. When she turned, his eyes were on her—noiselessly he had arrived.

She stared. She had never seen him so frail. His sharp eyes were blunted and sunk into his skull, the fringe of his hair flat against his brow, his clothes as disheveled and stained as hers. He looked at her for a long moment before turning away.

"You're late," he said, his voice a harsh croak.

It was the most he had said to her in two days. Had he been afraid that she, too, would go missing—that she, too, would be found in the snow in a circle of blood? She tied her apron tight, fumbling with the knot at her back.

“I’m here,” she said. Her voice wavered. He looked at her again—there was a tremor in his jaw as he clenched it tight—and he shivered. He turned to the stores he had pulled from the pantry, leftovers from First Day and cases of new deliveries.

She did not know what to do, now that ovens crackled and the morning’s bread had already been baked. The day’s menu lay on the worktable; she went to it and tried to puzzle out the words so that she did not have to bother Fabien with reading it aloud. Numbers scratched in the Steward’s tiny script besides lists in Master Donatien’s quicker, more perfunctory writing; she could not understand it except in pieces. She raised herself up, bracing to ask for help as she turned to Fabien.

He was already watching her—she pressed her lips tightly shut.

“Maker,” he said, and his voice cracked. “What am I supposed to do with _these_?”

He tipped over a bowl filled with withered lemons. They rolled across the table and fell with a hard crack against the floor. Bri stooped to pick them up, pinching the corners of her apron together and placing them inside. Their skins were dry and hard, and they rattled together like stones as she retrieved each one.

“We—“ Bri began, but stopped herself when she looked up to see tears streaming down his red face. Her apron slipped from her fingers and she watched the lemons tumble back to the floor—again she knelt to snatch them up. But when she had risen he had already turned back to his work, and the kitchen door opened and a handful of people entered to begin the day’s chores, Lowri among them. Fabien drew the knife from his belt and began some other chore to busy himself, the tendons in his neck long and taut, his back stiff, his shoulders trembling. Quietly Bri placed the lemons back into the bowl and, head down, she went to the pantry. She felt Lowri watch her as she left them.

Orlesian pastry takes two days of work. The dough she had prepared in the days since Lille’s death lay on a shelf beside frost-covered fruit. She took it down, firm in its wrappings of damp cloth. The kneading and folding had helped her forget. She knew this now.There were enough for two dozen. She would fold them into pinwheels again and make herself happy. She returned to the kitchen with her parcel of sweet dough, set in her task.

 _Trop de citron_. Put lemon in mine. She could hear Lille’s voice. The bowl of lemons still sat on the table, unnoticed. Bri went to them and greedily tucked each one into her arms. She didn’t know how nicked and dry her hands were until the lemon juice bit into each invisible scratch. Still, she ground away the skin, left nothing but the fleshy pith and pulp, then strained what little flavour was left in them into a bright yellow syrup. Fabien watched her intermittently, sometimes envious, sometimes curious—she did not know what to say to him. The scent of summer fruit filled the kitchen and made everyone remember.

Soon she pulled the finished pastries from the oven to cool. They needed sugar—they needed dusting with sugar. With a glance to the kitchenhands scattered around the room, Bri brought a stepping-stool to the shelf and reached up for her prize.

Even the fire seemed to still its crackling as Bri carefully processed to the table with the sugar bowl. This simple, squat urn—this clay pot, that was trusted to hold such a treasured thing. Sugar. Lille’s sugar.

She placed it reverently beside the tarts.

Removing the lid, Bri dipped a finger into the powdered sugar. Lille had ground it down to dust, laughing with the others as she did. If she placed it to her lips, would she taste the laughter? She ground the grains between her fingertips—and Lowri snatched up her wrist, wrenching it away from the bowl of sugar with a panicked yelp.

“What are you _doing_?” Lowri said in a hoarse shriek that rattled the pans suspended from the ceiling. The whole of the kitchen watched them now.

“I’m—I’m making pastries,” Bri said, pulling her hand away; she wound them, again, in her apron. “I thought—”

“Why would you make _these_?”

They fanned out, glittering, before Lowri’s drawn eyes. Bri stood beside them, her back straight.

“I thought—“ Bri started again, but trailed away, unsure. She looked at them; fleshy and obscene, they lay spread upon the table with their bright cores. Lille would have laughed.

“They’re Lille’s favorite,” Bri said, her voice firm. No one spoke. Lowri turned away, closing her eyes to the thought, as though she had not heard her.

“I knew _that_ much about her,” Bri said boldly. It brought Lowri’s hard gaze back to her.

“Don’t touch the sugar,” she said. There was a heavy desperation in her voice which cracked hard as she raised it to descend upon Bri. She did not flinch.

“We _have_ to use it. It’s not right—”

“I’m telling you that you _can’t!_ It’s _Lille’s!_ You—”

They were silenced by a slap of dough against the countertop. Fabien turned, his eyes flaring, filling the room with his voice.

“If we can’t use it then we might as well give it to the horses!”

This stilled the kitchen more quickly, more finally than Lowri had. Even the flames in the hearth seemed to bow at the sound.

“What do _you_ know?” Lowri drew the knife from her apron and held the handle tightly in her palm. “Neither of you were in the valley last night. And _you_ were the worst of all. You made her life miserable, you bloody _shem_.”

Lowri jabbed the tip of her knife at him—Fabien stepped back. His eyes, which had been lit again with that familiar green fire, were snuffed out again. He shook his head absently, as if he could refuse all the thoughts that rushed through his distracted mind. The blade hung in the air, flashing silver.

“ _You_ should have—”

Lowri’s words ended in a sharp gasp as the door swung open, hitting the stone wall heavily. The fire in the hearth bent and fluttered at the sudden rush. Lowri jammed her knife back into the folds of her apron as the kitchen’s eyes turned towards the woman who stood in the entryway.

"My Lady, the Marquise d'Osseux, requests a member of the Inquisition's _kitchen_ attend to her."

A heavy Orlesian accent from beneath a tooth-lined mask; it was the handmaiden who had brought the doomed bird two days before. Turned her head to examine the room, her gaze lingering on the sooty streaks of grease that stained the stone behind the ovens; there was a nervous silence. The woman held fast to her skirts, refusing to let the training lace brush the straw that covered the stone flooring. It was not a place for fine clothing; she had walked down many steps.

" _Here_."

Lowri, with a sharp, definite movement, shoved Bri towards the masked woman. It was not like the night she had shoved and screamed—this one was with the same slow deliberation as when she strangled the jug of milk. Bri stumbled a few steps into the middle of the room, where the kitchen's multitude of eyes watched her for a moment before turning away. Bri turned back to Lowri, who looked at her as if she was a bird that needed plucking.

"Go." Lowri's voice was heavy. Fabien said nothing; Bri watched as he stared at the masked woman with slack, animal eyes, his chest rising in fitful breaths, before he turned away, back to his work—as if he refused the thought of anything existing outside of it.

“Come with me, girl.”

The woman held out her hand, snapping her fingers expectantly for Bri to follow. The woman’s nails had been filed to sharp points and painted a glittering black, like pieces of coal. They flashed before Bri’s eyes.

She pulled her apron up and over her head, smoothed her dress, then dropped her gaze and dutifully followed the sweep of the woman’s skirts. They walked up the long staircase to the grand hall; the close passageway opened up to whispers that echoed across the vaulted stones. Bri only watched her scuffed shoes as they passed from straw to stone to carpeting.

She was brought to a latched door and ushered inside by the handmaiden’s beckoning—she did not lay a hand on her shoulder or press at her back, but hovered with her painted fingers as though afraid to touch a dirty thing. The room was oppressively hot, the walls covered with threadbare hangings—faded blood fell from the throat of a speared stag as it danced from panel to panel until finally dying in the teeth of a hunting dog. The windows had been shuttered and their curtains drawn heavily over them to shut out every trickle of natural light, leaving nothing but sharp points of firelight flickering across the weavings. Bri felt her heart trembling fitfully; she placed a hand to her chest, as if she could will it into a motionless silence.

The Marquise appeared first as a shadow against the far wall, then the woman sat up from amongst a heap of cushions, her dress twisting about her as she rose. She wore thesame mask as her attendant, but her teeth that edged the lower half of the mask were gold-tipped and filed to fine points. The rest was a mirrored surface with only the suggestion of closed eyes, a hollow nose, cheekbones protruding too sharply to be truly human. At her side a young elf massaged one of the Marquise’s hands, applying gold dust suspended in some sort of white animal fat to every inch of her forearm. Bri stared as the woman’s skin was covered over with glimmering color, hiding the veins that spread across her pale hands like uneven latticework. The only flesh visible in her costume was her long, white neck, crossed with yellow jewels.

The Marquise turned to face her with a sharp movement of her mirrored mask. For a long moment a drawn, unkempt girl stared back—Bri’s reflection, only. A held breath trapped in her chest, she dipped into a silent, unsteady curtsey and lowered her eyes from the grotesque distortion.

The maid leaned to whisper to her mistress. Bri thought for a long, hideous moment that the mask’s teeth would graze the servant’s throat, but she was brought away from the sight by the emergence of some creature from the skirts of the Marquise’s fabulous dress. It was a fawn—only a few months old, still spotted white along its back, its eyes large and fearful. It tentatively touched its little wet nose to the Marquise’s gilded, outstretched palm. They had dressed it in little fineries and clapped a golden collar around its neck which hung with the insignia of her house. They had even gilded its hooves with the same heavy paint as the Marquise’s hands; its knock-kneed, wobbling gait was unsteady as it ached to lift its steps.

Bri watched the fawn for a moment and wondered if that, too, would be sent to the kitchens for the servants to slaughter—that all the living things the Marquise had brought with her would be killed for her pleasure, from the drowned and helpless _ortolan_ to the maid speaking into the Marquise’s ear.

She dragged all her courage up.

“You asked me to come, your Grace?” Bri said, lifting her eyes.

“Obviously,” said the Marquise, and her voice was as sharp as the teeth in her mask. The fawn started and nearly stumbled at the sound; the maid knelt and drew the struggling thing into her arms, holding it close to her chest as it bleated piteously and kicked its brittle legs. The sad creature left a trail of glitter behind it as the maid took it to a corner of the room to coo and whisper into its spotted fur, its ribs protruding so sharply beneath its stretch of skin she could slip a finger neatly between each one.

The Marquise cleared her throat noisily behind her mask. Bri wondered how the woman ate at all—even her mouth was covered over with its silver jaw.

“I have heard a girl has been found dead. A girl from the kitchen here. Did you know her?”

Bri wound her hands in her skirts again, hiding them away.

“Yes, your Grace.”

“I see. So I am to understand you are not at your full capacity?”

“No, your Grace.”

“Is that, then, the excuse for presenting me with burned chocolate this morning?”

“I didn’t—“

The Marquise yanked her shining hand from her lap and held it up to silence Bri at once.

“Are you saying that I do not know how _chocolate_ tastes?”

The sound echoed shrilly. Bri bowed her head again to the mirrored stare.

“No, your Grace.”

“Perhaps _you_ do not know how chocolate tastes.”

Bri was silent. With a flash of gold, the elf jumped up, leaving the fawn alone as they went to the sideboard where the delicate saucer and cup sat among a coil of withered bluebells. The servant picked it up and brought it to Bri, pushing it into her hands. Bri held it with the tips of her fingers; she could smell the bitterness that lay within.

“Drink it.” The Marquise’s voice came up in a strangled whisper behind Bri’s reflected face.

Bri lifted the delicate thing; the cup was very fine, its edge painted gold. She was half afraid of dropping it, her hands shaking as she held it, and compounding the crime. She pressed the porcelain to her papery lips.

It was Fabien—Fabien had made the chocolate before she had come to the kitchen. She’d had chocolate once, just a taste as a child; it was warm, like a heavy caress. Black and burnt, all ash and anger, Fabien’s chocolate touched her tongue; she tensed, held back her wince, let it slide down her throat. Her mouth closed around the bitter memory. All of his grief turned in her stomach.

The Marquise laughed. Her mask showed a girl with tangled hair and dark shadows for eyes holding a cup too fine for her stained fingers.

“You are so sweet. Like one of those Tranquil—though I imagine you are not nearly as valuable.”

Bri placed the teacup back on the waiting tray—the Marquise’s servant had stepped forward and held it out for her, eyes down but lips pressed into a hard, thin line. The fawn lay dead or asleep in the corner of the room.

“Do not burn my chocolate again.”

“Yes, your Grace.”

With a glint of gold she was dismissed. She curtsied again, more steadily this time, and left with the handmaid trailing after her.

Bri dabbed sweat from her brow with her dress sleeve as she walked the way back. She bit her tongue to draw the bitter taste from her mouth. When she came to the stairs that descended to the kitchen, she heard the handmaid titter behind her mask.

“I knew the chocolate was burned. I didn’t tell her.”

Bri did not ask why. The woman’s laugh echoed in the passageway that twisted down into the castle’s depths. Spite slid down her tongue as she swallowed it back.

 

Lowri’s hand lingered at her apron-strings for the rest of the day. The pot of sugar lay undisturbed. Fabien left some time after the evening meal, where for the third night the Steward’s prayer went interrupted, where even the food lay untouched while the Chant was sung.

The next day’s dough was folded by Bri alone.

It was dark when she left. As she descended the steps there was a sound like an animal cry from the stables; Bri stood silent for a long moment, waiting to hear it again—she did not. The snow glinted a deep silver in the moonlight as she picked her way through the tracked courtyard to huddle in the doorway.

It was Fabien—he was sat in the cold straw beneath the steps to the hayloft, squatting with his head in his hands. It was where she had found the kitten all that time ago—it was where Cole had appeared, carrying it—it was where Fabien had found it dead. He trembled as if his limbs were not properly joined together, as if he would shake to pieces like the little fawn under the Marquise’s golden fingers. Bri had never seen someone come so undone. She could not know how many times he had unburdened himself here so he could become as still as unflinching as knives, as empty as fire, all of his strength spent on living so painfully.

The ravens cackled as she approached, announcing her with their mockery.

“Maker!” Fabien yowled—but his voice cracked, his fingers trembling as he slid them across his face. He edged out of the shadow of the stairs. His cheeks were wet, raw in the cold—hair mussed, eyes sharp and red-lined in the low light. Worse than that morning—Bri stared at his wrenched face for a long moment until he hid it again, turning away.

“What are you _doing_ here?” he hissed. “Go back—Go back to wherever you belong!”

His voice trembled and died even as he tried to spit out this last demand. She watched him, standing hunched in the straw.

“Fabien—” she began, but stopped short as he jabbed one of his thin fingers at her.

“It should have been _you_ ,” he snapped, the sound weak. Then he hit one of the wooden beams with his fists; his knuckles bruised and broke against it.

“It should have been _me!_ ”

He trembled there, the icy sheen of his pain irrevocably broken. There was blood and flour smeared across his flesh. She moved to stand beside him. He nearly jumped away from her, but then slowed, stilled, remained. He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes darting fearfully across her face as though he could not understand the meaning of her presence. Then he looked away again.

“ _Pointless_ ,” he hissed as he wiped his hands on his shirtsleeves. He stepped away, with frail, knock-kneed steps, chanting to himself. “Stupid— _stupid_.”

He tore the mourning band from his wrist, wringing it between his hands. For a moment he looked as though he would fling it into the coals in the brazier but he stopped himself and simply let it drop to his feet.

He took a few steps back as Bri approached; she picked up the slip of cloth and held it to her chest. It smelled faintly of vanilla. For a moment she saw Lille’s long, dark hair, clouded by wine.

“I miss her, too,” she said, even as her throat tightened around each word.

At this he crumpled to the floor, sinking to his knees beside a pile of straw, his skillful hands spread, useless, before him. He took a long, gasping breath, as if he had only just come up for air. She came and knelt down beside him. She would make herself as small as he.

Bri took Fabien by the hand. He resisted for a moment, snatching his hand away when her fingertips brushed his bleeding knuckles. But she reached again and he allowed her to grasp one thin, long-fingered hand, his arm limp.

“I don’t—I don’t have the _right_.”

His voice had fallen to a whisper that barely stirred the air.

“It’s not—It’s not about the _right_ ,” Bri said, stumbling over the words. His blood smeared under her fingertips. “It’s just—It’s how we feel. It’s just how we feel.”

His fingers were cold and sharp; she warmed them nonetheless, in hers, even as it stained her palms. He looked at their entwined hands as if it were a threat—but he did not draw back.

“Why are you pretending that you don’t _hate_ me?” He glanced up with his gleaming eyes. “ _She_ hated me. Maker, I _made_ her hate me.”

She crumbled his blood between her hands. Silently, she stood, and pulled him up with her. He unfolded limply, like a crumpled rag, and pressed his shoulder to hers to keep himself upright. She could feel all the fine bones of his fingers beneath his skin, as cracked and bruised as her own.

She led him up the stairs, following her footsteps, mindful, knowing. Together they crossed the moonlit room they both knew sightlessly, and for the second time that day Bri reached up and took Lille’s sugar down from its shelf.

“What are you doing?” he said, the words trembling as they fell from his lips. Clutching the pot to her chest, Bri took Fabien’s hand again and smiled weakly.

“It’s too good for anyone,” Bri said. “That might as well mean it’s no good at all. Lille wouldn’t want this. She wouldn’t want us crying over a bowl of sugar. She’d _laugh_. Can’t you hear her? She would laugh at all of us, if she could see.”

Fabien’s eyes shifted uneasily for a moment, but then he let out a long, extinguished sigh, and nodded.

They returned to the barn; the horse that came to the stable door wasn’t the Inquisitor’s prize mare but instead the surefooted nag who trudged the cartfuls of pilgrims up from the valley every hour. It hung its heavy head over the stable door and stared with one large, bleary brown eye, a forelock hanging over its nose in a rough braid.

“She never gets sugar,” Bri said. “Lille can give her some.”

She lifted the lid of the jar; the sugar lay inside, glittering in the torchlight. Carefully, Bri drew her fingertips through it, feeling it crumble under her touch.

“It’s lumpy,” Bri said with a small smile. She forced laughter through her teeth, glancing up at Fabien. “It’s lumpy! She didn’t even grind it right.”

“She was always—“ Fabien began with his usual tone, though his words faltered and died. Bri sifted the sugar between her fingers, watching the misshapen grains fall between them and back into the pot. Then she lifted a handful and brought it to the horse’s nose.

It tickled her palm with its lips as it greedily crunched down on the offered treat. It took handfuls of sugar from them both—even Fabien scooped up some to hold it out, tentatively, for the horse. They smiled, and laughed as it reached out with its lips and teeth and took the palmful of sugar from him, too, even as his hand shook and the horse snorted white powder and scattered it across the hay at their feet.

The laughter left them. Bri placed the half-emptied jar on the ground. The horse’s heavy breath was the only sound in the night, one eye turned to stare at the pair of them. They were reflected in it, standing together with their hands entwined, shadows fasted on grief.

“How do you make it _stop_?” Fabien whispered, head tilted to stare at the ceiling. “How do you make the world stop _kicking_ you?”

“I’m sorry,” Bri said, and the words broke into tears that slid down her face. She said it again and again—but simple sound did nothing.

“She never—I—” he stuttered, but then the words pulled back into roiling cries, formless, featureless, a sound that made his body wither in the cold. He fell into her arms.

“Lille— _Lille!_ ” he cried again, and she felt the name in the bend of his spine. Carefully she held him and hid her stinging eyes in the crook of his shoulder. They wept in the dark. Bound up in their grief, they were here together.


End file.
